EBME Forums Forums Free discussion Free discussion MHRA site move to gov.uk

I don't know how big is the love for the MHRA here, but is anyone else aghast at their website move to the gov.uk domain and subsequent changes?

https://www.gov.uk/medicines-medical-devices-blood/medical-devices-regulation-safety

I think it is obviously something forced on them from central government but to make their site fit a standard template all content has been shifted around and now medical devicea and medicines are lumped together to make it much harder to find and download alerts, device bulletins and field safety notices

Never were the words of Joan Baez more apt, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"

Clean, uncluttered ... and the Search facility at top-right works just fine (and quickly).

What's not to like?

I feel the dead hand of Whitehall has fallen heavily and possibly fatally on our colleagues at MHRA.

Yes, very heavily "Medicines" orientated, it doesn't encourage nosing around any longer and I'm sorry Geoff, but the search facility might be fast but I'm not sure the stuff is there to be found now. Try putting MDDL in and you get 0 results, try instead Medical Device Driving Licence and it provides a link to the DVLA!!!

Similarly for those of us that remember our guidance documents by their DB codes - DB 2006 brings up amongst other things "Agri-environment indicators" but no sign of the expected Managing Medical Devices publication. For anyone interested it can now be found here http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20141205150130/http://www.mhra.gov.uk/Publications/Safetyguidance/DeviceBulletins/CON2025142, along with other long lost government documents.

Yep, times they are a-changing.

Brian

Google still works, though (for the time being, at least).

thanks BB, you've aleady got in there with a lot of my gripes, but I have more!

For instance we (in my role) are encouraged to bring field safety safety notices to the attention of our end-users and the old MHRA mailing list made this very easy as each week's summary had a link on the individual notices to the relevant pdf so we could copy and paste this into a monthly summary.
Now the only link in the mailing list is to a webpage of pdfs but you can't even copy and paste that list because of the way the page is configured. And you can only find that page through the email as a search for Field Safety Notice on the website itself gives you a result that includes every single alert that mentions its corresponding FSN

https://www.gov.uk/drug-device-alerts
DOES THIS WORK?

that only returns MDAs, not FSNs (unless they are part of an MDA).

Though to be fair the search option has been improved in the last few days as it now automatically filters MDAs when you select that option, and will now do a search when you hit return whilst in the search box rather than having to hit a separate filter button. Maybe they are starting to respond to feedback

and as Brian mentioned it's just not as easy to browse anymore, go to the product-specific page and all devices and medicines documents are mixed together with no option to filter into one or the other

Try and do a general search for device bulletin and you'll only get MDAs, not DB documents

Not impressed

seems I'm not the only one unimpressed by the move to GOV.UK

Inside GOV.UK: 'CHAOS' and 'NIGHTMARE' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/18/the_inside_story_of_govuk

Can you point us to any Government IT project that didn't cost (waste) zillions or one that is an example of good design.

But don't worry, "lessons will be learned", (fat) salaries will still be paid, and promotions (of incompetent idiots) - "honours", even - will follow!

BTW, I notice that the piece you linked to mentions "software professors". Oh, Brave New World.

This is the before* (.pdf) ... I'll leave you all to draw your own conclusions about the "after".

My take on this stuff is along the lines of:- why should we worry about "cyber attacks" from Rogue Nations (whomever they may be), when our Own People (in theory, at least) are seemingly quite capable of bringing the country to a juddering halt easily enough all by themselves.

Once again it's the old question:- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

* If nothing else, I can recommend checking out the signature on the last page!