Press Releases

01 Apr 2018 The Government's Soft Drinks Industry Levy will come into affect on Friday 6 April 2018. The Faculty of Dental Surgery has previously welcomed the levy and called for some of the money generated to be used for children's oral health programmes.

08 Mar 2018 Over 62,000 fewer NHS treatments, including surgical operations, were performed by consultants this winter (November - January) compared to the previous winter, analysis by the Royal College of Surgeons shows.

07 Mar 2018 The Royal College of Surgeons has said it strongly welcomes news that the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service has revoked restrictions on David Sellu’s practice and ruled that no tribunal considering his fitness to practise can proceed.

01 Mar 2018 “The GIRFT Vascular report shows that many patients with potentially fatal conditions can wait far too long before they see a consultant vascular surgeon. It also demonstrates great variation in provision of care across the country which does not need to be the case."

22 Feb 2018 Northern Ireland Department of Health waiting time statistics published today show patients are still waiting too long for surgery. Data for the quarter from October to the end of December 2017 show 61.2% of patients were waiting longer than 13 weeks to be admitted for inpatient or day case treatment. For the same period, 19.1% (almost one in five) of patients waited more than 52 weeks to be admitted for inpatient or day case treatment. In total, this number was 14,979.

22 Feb 2018 The General Medical Council has today announced that Dame Clare Marx, past president of the Royal College of Surgeons, will chair a review of how manslaughter by gross negligence is applied to medical practice across the four nations of the UK.

18 Feb 2018 The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) has called on NHS England to stop clinical commissioning groups from imposing minimum waiting times. A freedom of information request by the RCS found that certain patients in Lincolnshire must wait at least three months for non-urgent surgery under minimum waiting times rules imposed at some hospitals. Surgeons are concerned that minimum waiting times will leave patients waiting in pain and discomfort for an unnecessarily long time and make it difficult for health providers to meet the Government’s 18-week target for planned surgery.

16 Feb 2018 A new UCL-led study published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica suggests amyloid beta pathology – protein deposits in the brain – might have been transmitted by contaminated neurosurgical instruments. Amyloid beta is best known for being one of the hallmark proteins of Alzheimer’s disease, but the researchers did not find evidence of Alzheimer’s in this study.

08 Feb 2018 NHS performance data published today shows there has been a further decline in the percentage of patients seen within four hours of attendance at a major Accident and Emergency (A&E) department in England.

02 Feb 2018 NHS England and NHS Improvement have published planning guidance to the NHS for 2018/19. This notes the Government has made available a further £540m for the NHS on top of what was promised in the November Budget. The planning guidance says that some of this money should be directed towards a substantially bigger annual increase in NHS-funded elective operations than in recent years. It expects the waiting list not to remain at the same level in March 2019 as at March 2018.