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Pharmacists’ essential role in medicines safety was highlighted by two stories in The Pharmaceutical Journal this week. New guidance from NHS England said that patients in emergency or acute hospital departments should have all their time-critical medicines identified and prescribed, including a plan for pharmacy review, within 24 hours of admission.
Another story shed light on what happens when pharmacists do not have the infrastructure they need, suggesting that community pharmacist access to patient records could have prevented the death of a patient who took contraindicated drugs.
Pharmacists have a particular role to play in supporting medicines safety in specialised fields, such as maternal and neonatal care, so this week our health news round-up contains new research presented at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine 2026 Pregnancy Meeting, as well as other health news you may have missed this week.
Medicines in pregnancy
Pregnant patients who stopped taking their antidepressant medication during pregnancy were almost twice as likely to experience a mental health emergency compared with pregnant patients who continued taking their prescription, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have suggested.
Another study presented at the meeting found that offering aspirin to all pregnant women at the earliest opportunity could reduce severe pre-eclampsia risk by almost one-third, with no increase in maternal haemorrhage or placental abruption among those who took aspirin.
Researchers from the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network studied 434 children between the ages of 18 months and 30 months for signs of autism or other neurodevelopmental problems, and found no association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy and autism in children.
Further reading
- ‘Principles of drug use and management in pregnancy’;
- ‘‘No evidence’ that paracetamol use during pregnancy causes autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities, meta-analysis finds’;
- ‘Valproate in pregnancy reaches lowest level yet, data suggest’;
- ‘Avoid prescribing NSAIDs after 20 weeks of pregnancy, advises medicines regulator’.
GLP-1s and eating disorders
Pharmacists, positioned at the interface of prescribing and patient use, are critical to ensuring the safe and ethical use of GLP-1s, says Anastasia Tew and Chetan Shah in an opinion piece for The Pharmaceutical Journal this week. In particular, they should look out for red flags that may identify patients who have an eating disorder or who are at risk of developing one.
Further reading
NICE guidance for cancers, lupus and eye infections
Immunotherapy will be incorporated into both stages of stages of treatment for muscle-invasive bladder cancer as new draft guidance gives NHS approval for durvalumab with gemcitabine and cisplatin before surgery and alone after surgery. The chemotherapy drip is set to give more than 630 people in England a more effective treatment to prevent the cancer returning, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said.
This week, NICE has also published final guidance that recommends NHS use of talazoparib with enzalutamide for untreated hormone-relapsed metastatic prostate cancer when other options are not suitable, niraparib for maintenance treatment of advanced ovarian, fallopian tube and peritoneal cancer after response to first-line platinum-based chemotherapy, where bevacizumab was not given or tolerated, and obinutuzumab with mycophenolate mofetil for treating lupus nephritis.
However, draft guidance also published this week does not recommend NHS use of polihexanide eye drops for treating acanthamoeba keratitis in people aged 12 years and over. However, this does not affect treatment that has already started on the NHS. In the draft guidance, NICE said there were uncertainties in the clinical evidence that made it impossible to establish the cost-effectiveness of the treatment.
