UK allergy provisions ‘not good enough’

An expert has slammed the UK’s provisions for the treatment of millions of allergy sufferers.

Professor Pamela Ewan of the Royal College of Physicians, a consultant allergist and co-chair of the National Allergy Strategy Group, has described the lack of infrastructure available to the nation’s 20 million allergy sufferers as a “historic problem”.

The professor told Radio Four’s Today programme that allergies were always seen as a “small speciality” and that the NHS has not caught up with the changing needs of allergy sufferers.

She remarked: “We’ve been trying to develop allergy services for the last ten or 15 years and there has actually been very little change.”

“I think the Department of Health’s review has just made a number of suggestions and at least they now can see that there is a major problem, but the recommendations they’re making don’t take us very much further forward and that’s largely because they’re suggesting local development,” she said.

Professor Ewan concluded: “We have two problems; we have lack of a specialist workforce, that’s tiny, and then we have the vast majority of GPs have little information or knowledge of allergy.”

Two years ago, the House of Commons Health Committee published a report on the provision of allergy services in the UK, which concluded that the claim of a health minister that there was “no unmet need” could not be accepted since there was no definitive mechanism to record this.

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