The extra cash promised for medical research in this year's Budget will be used in the fight against four major diseases.

Health secretary John Reid announced that the funding, which will amount to an extra £100m a year by 2008, will be targeted at Alzheimer's disease, stroke, diabetes and mental health. It will also be used to develop new medicines for children.

The scheme — to be known as the UK Clinical Research Collaboration (UKCRC) — will be modelled on the National Cancer Research Network. It will link the NHS, the medical research council, charities and industry.

At the moment the government budget for medical research is £1billion. Now this will rise to £1.2billion by 2008, with the NHS getting an extra £25m each year.

John Reid said: 'Investment in research saves lives. That is why the government wishes to make Britain the best place for R&D and innovation in the world. I wish to ensure that the NHS's contribution to medical research is one of the centrepieces of that.'

The first ever national review of the Scottish diabetes service has taken place, highlighting good practice in the care of diabetes patients, but stressing areas where improvements are needed. NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (QIS) — the clinical effectiveness body — undertook the research.

Around 150,000 people in Scotland (over 3 per cent of the population) have been diagnosed with diabetes, whilst it is estimated that a further 90,000 may unknowingly have the condition. The rate of diabetes is doubling every decade.

QIS visited local health services across Scotland to examine the performance of NHS boards against the agreed standards of care for people with diabetes. The majority of boards were found to provide a high standard of care. The report calls for progress to be made in:

• diagnosing diabetes earlier
• managing it more effectively
• improving fragmented services
• putting the patient at the heart of their own care

Health Minister Malcolm Chisholm said:

'I am pleased that the report's findings show that the care of people with diabetes in Scotland is generally of a very high quality. The report also praises the commitment, enthusiasm, dedication and hard work of staff involved in providing diabetes services. That praise is richly deserved. However, there is clearly room for improvement. The most significant message is that services are too fragmented and need to be better co-ordinated in order to address the complexity of care needed by people with diabetes.'

The report will feed into the current review of the Scottish diabetes framework.

The rate of superbug MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) infection among children has risen dramatically over the past 10 years, the Health Protection Agency has revealed. To ensure rates do not increase further, the agency claims, action must be taken now, including a national review of risk factors.

The study looked at voluntary lab reports of MRSA collated by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), and found the number of blood-stream infections in children has risen from less than 1 per cent in 1990 to over 13 per cent in 2000.

The findings have been published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood following joint research with St George’s Hospital, London.

Dr Georgia Duckworth of the HPA said:

‘Children who succumb to MRSA infections are usually very sick already and therefore vulnerable to infection and it is often difficult to tell where the infection was acquired. Although MRSA amongst adults has been increasing steadily since the early 1990s, we are now seeing for the first time evidence of an emerging problem in children. The levels of MRSA infection in children are still very low relative to older age groups, but we must take steps to ensure that MRSA infection in children does not increase to the same levels as adults.’

A new drug to treat breast cancer is raising hopes that it may outperform the current highly-favoured tamoxifen.

The merits of aromatase inhibitors were discussed at the fourth European breast cancer conference (EBCC) in Hamburg. The new drug target enzymes, controlling tumour growth and boosting survival hopes.

Improvements in treating heart disease mean that within a decade nobody under the age of 65 should die from the condition. This is the bold projection made in a progress report on the work done since the introduction of the national service framework for coronary heart disease four years ago.

Health Secretary John Reid and national director for heart disease Dr Roger Boyle have Winning the war on heart disease: progress report 2004

Figures from the report show that more than 90 out of 100,000 men died of heart disease in 1990. Ten years later this figure had dropped to about 50. If the downward trend in heart deaths in both men and women continues, deaths among under-65s could be almost zero by around 2012.

23 per cent drop in all deaths related to heart or circulatory diseases between 1997-2002

Mr Reid said:

'Seven years ago cardiac services were in a terrible state. Patients could wait for years for diagnosis and over two years for surgery. Few people suffering a heart attack were getting the right treatment at the right time and those needing life-saving drugs did so through good fortune rather than a good system,' he said.

John Reid announced a package of measures to build on this success:

• £1m pilot project to provide a 24-hour angioplasty service (a procedure to unblock arteries)
• from April 2005 patients will be given the choice of where they have surgery as soon as they need an operation (at present they must wait six months)
• £20m to provide new cardiac facilities in Dorset, Somerset and Newcastle

About 1.8 million people (over 3 per cent of the population) are on statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs. Spending on statins is expected to rise to £694.7m for 2003/04, an annual increase of 30 per cent. It is estimated that the use of statins saves up 7,000 lives a year as well as reducing the number of heart attacks.

(Left to right) Marking the graduation of the first English supplementary prescriber pharmacists are health minister Rosie Winterton, president of the RPSGB Dr Gill Hawksworth, dean of Bradford University’s school of health studies Gwendolen Bradshaw and the university’s vice-chancellor professor Chris Taylor.

Health minister Rosie Winterton greeted England's first nine supplementary prescriber pharmacists as they graduated from Bradford University.

The minister said: 'Pharmacists are a highly skilled, well trained, but often an under used resource within the NHS. Extending prescribing responsibilities to pharmacists will make getting the right medicine easier and more convenient than ever before and will help to reduce the burden on GPs by giving them more time to deal with acutely ill patients.'

Gill Hawksworth of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) said: 'Supplementary prescribing will really help increase public confidence in pharmacists’ ability to perform a more clinical role at the front line of healthcare.'

As well as Bradford University, 13 other English higher education institutions have supplementary prescribing programmes available. The courses are accredited by the RPSGB.

The latest DoH figures show a record increase in the number of NHS nurses, GPs and consultants.

The 2003 NHS workforce census indicates that the NHS has:

• 386,400 nurses — an increase of 18,800
• 109,000 doctors — and increase of 5,600
• 122,100 scientists and other therapists — an increase of 2,500

There are 1,282,900 people in England working for the NHS.

Health Secretary John Reid commented: 'Today's figures explode the myth that everyone working in the NHS is a bureaucrat or manager. 84 per cent of NHS staff are directly involved in patient care while managers and senior managers make up only three per cent of the total NHS workforce.'

An extra £30m from the Scottish Executive is to help health boards free up resources for direct patient care.

The funding, which is in addition to the revenue allocations announced in January, will go directly to the boards. The breakdown is:

• Argyll and Clyde: £2.596m
• Ayrshire and Arran: £2.331m
• Borders: £676,000
• Dumfries and Galloway: £973,000
• Fife: £2.015m
• Forth Valley: £1.585m
• Grampian: £2.725m
• Greater Glasgow: £5.548m
• Highland: £1.390m
• Lanarkshire: £3.206m
• Lothian: £4.054m
• Orkney: £126,000
• Shetland: £136,000
• Tayside: £2.401m
• Western Isles: £238,000