what is anaphylaxis
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A review of services for allergy – Department of Health 2006
You can read the full review at www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/13/73/77/04137377.pdf
The Department of Health's official review - the report we had all been waiting for - was a serious disappointment, in the view of The Anaphylaxis Campaign.
The newspaper headlines that followed the report could hardly have been more dramatic. "Spiralling allergies to hit 18 million Britons," the Times told readers on its front page. Other papers carried a similar bleak tale of people with allergies let down badly by the NHS.
The messages were clear: Hospital admissions had more than tripled in a decade. People were waiting nine months to see a consultant. Lives were at risk. The NHS was not coping.
The Government seemed to acknowledge all this in its report. But the measures proposed for solving the problem were unimpressive. It announced that local commissioners would be "encouraged" to establish the need for allergy services in their own communities; it spoke of "exploring the scope" for creating additional training places for allergists; and it said it would "consider the options" for commissioning allergy guidelines by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
These are all moderately useful steps, but what we really need is a complete overhaul of the present set-up. We want to see nothing less than an allergy centre provided in every region of the NHS, 40 new allergy doctors employed to meet the growing need, and full training and support for GPs. This is not actually expensive and might be more cost-effective than the current situation - with traumatic and expensive hospital admissions becoming ever more common.
