Description

The good news is that we are now in a position to publish three Editions of the Bulletin a year, which would not have been possible without help from our excellent Associate Editors. For the past year, the BSACI has helped to finance the Bulletin and the Board is now exploring options for long term funding. We hope to bring this to a satisfactory conclusion within the next few months, but there is no guarantee that this Bulletin will continue to be distributed free. There seems to be a general consensus that the Bulletin is useful for continuing professional development (CPD), an activity which is becoming more formal, with an almost ‘legal’ requirement now for consultants to present evidence of CPD activity during their annual appraisals. With this in mind, I encourage all our readers to support the Bulletin and to acquire extra CPD points by contributing reviews, case reports and letters. Another bit of encouraging news is that the first UK Commissioned Service for Specialised Immunology has started in London. You may remember that ‘specialised immunology’ provides the service for patients with primary immunodeficiency: a clinical network has been set up between six PID centres in London, and is likely to be extended into the home counties within the next year. There is now some consistency in the methods used by London Hospital Trusts to cost PID services, this being a prerequisite for a commissioned service. One of the potential advantages of such a service is that clinics within the network will have the opportunity to convince the commissioners of the necessity to increase their budget should more money be needed to reach an adequate standard of service. We are in the privileged position of being one of the first commissioned services under this new system, and the Commissioners are clearly very interested in seeing whether we can make the system work for the benefit of patients so that they can use the same model for other subspecialties. Specialised Allergy now has a Definition (No. 17- see CPD Bulletin Vol 2 No.3) and is on the tortuous road to persuading the commissioners to activate this Service. There is also a Definition (No 25) for Specialised Pathology Services, and in the next Bulletin we will briefly review progress in this area and in the proposed Pathology Modernisation Programme.

David Webster