I have a faint recollection from my time living in the US, that Fox News channel ran a regular item on its late evening news programme which was called ‘Information Overload’ – a 30 second snippet of ‘news you can use’ – backed by heavy rock music.

I pass the following on with the same intent of informing but definitely not overloading.  You may choose music of your own liking.

The Academy of Medical Sciences today published its call for evidence as part of its independent review of medical research regulation.  The membership of its review panel, to be chaired by Sir Michael Rawlins, is to be announced shortly.  We’ll be looking out for appropriate charity representation on the group. But I’m pleased that they will be trawling far and wide for evidence and I’m already quite excited about ways in which we might work with our members to put across our perspective.

As you’ll see the Academy’s review will focus a lot on clinical trials.  So you may also be interested to know that the European Commission has published its summary of the responses to its public consultation on the operation of the Clinical Trials Directive.  You’ll remember that AMRC responded to the consultation earlier this year.  I am reliably informed that the next step is for the Commission to conduct an impact assessment but don’t hold your breath.

Earlier today I was in Manchester speaking to UK Clinical Trials Unit (CTU) Directors at their regular network meeting.  There are now 48 fully or provisionally registered CTUs in the UK and you can find further details here.  Many of the trials conducted by CTUs are of course funded by charities. But people probably are less aware that some charities such as Cancer Research UK (CRUK) run their own units.  Anyway, I thought this was a pretty good blog by CRUK about clinical trials and how such units work.  I trained it back to London at lunchtime enthused about the UK’s capabilites in this area and about the clear desire of the units  to work together to be well…the best. 

One of the discussions at the above meeting centred around the difficulties units faced in getting trials off the ground because of overburdensome regulation.  And it just so happens I’m off to present to the National Information Governance Board (NIGB) tomorrow about the work of AMRC and how we might work with them on information governance issues as they relate to the use of patient data for research.  All of which leads me neatly back to the Academy review which will also be exploring some aspects of this debate as part of its review.  I think that’s called a ‘link’ in tv and radio reporting.

Apologies that this is the third blog in a row to deal with clinical research matters but I don’t expect the dust to settle any time soon (no pun intended).   And no, my chosen music was not ‘Things can only get better’ by D-Ream.  Terrible tune.