Brexit – DAUK

‘Brexit making it tougher to get life-changing treatments

Matt Kneale — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:18:03 +0000

Brexit has made it more difficult for patients to receive life-changing drugs and treatments, DAUK committee members warned. Speaking in the i Paper, Dr David Nicholl said drug companies were moving medical trials out of the UK. Instead, they were being conducted in the EU and the US due to larger population sizes, he said. Dr Nicholl said: “When the UK made a choice to leave the European Union, we made a choice to make it more difficult to carry out clinical trials.” Dr Matt Kneale, former DAUK co-chair, said Brexit had made it tougher for NHS patients to access to new treatments. Contributing to the same article, Dr Kneale said: “This is no longer just a policy debate, it’s about people’s lives – and right now patients in the UK are being let down.” Read the article in full. Please support our work by contributing to our crowd funder or by becoming a member.

Why Doctors Need the Pay Rise – DAUK on LBC

Matt Kneale — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:43:31 +0000

DAUK’s Co-Chair Matt Kneale on LBC – and what the pay rise asked for means

“The money is there to spend when it needs to be spent … the claims about £350 million a week from Brexit, just TWO WEEKS of that would be enough to restore doctors pay”

Dr Matt Kneale Tweet

GP Frontline: a profile on DAUK

Matt Kneale — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 10:30:19 +0000

Coverage in the RCGP’s magazine GP Frontline:

“Adrian has recently been appointed as the media spokesperson for a fledging but already high-profile political lobbying group, The Doctors’ Association, providing the virtual organisation with a GP voice on issues such as Brexit, and the recent Bawa-Garba case.

“We’re an Independent, non-profit, non-partisan political lobbying group for doctors” . Adrian explains, “it was apparent that there was a desire for doctors to become more involved in political campaigning. The foundation of campaign groups nowadays are almost always on the internet and social media, it’s where we come together and have our dialogue. We don’t have a building or an office, we don’t have a pedigree of forefathers, we’ve started this on our own. We’re a small group based all over the country and conversations and planning are online.”

It was Adrian’s outspoken comments on Twitter in support of doctors and nurses at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital (following a high-profile High Court ruling in April) that brought him to the attention of DAUK founder Dr Sammy Batt-Rawden.

“The Alder Hey staff were coming under huge criticism but I agreed with the messages coming out of the hospital. Unbeknownst to me, DAUK we’re saying similar things.”

The case of trainee paediatrician Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba has given The Doctors’ Association a major platform and Adrian notes ‘our growth has been in parallel with the high profile of the case’.

”We want to move towards a ‘learn not blame’ culture in the NHS, with complete openness and transparency, so that when mistakes happen, tragic as they may be, we acknowledge all the different factors that contibruted to that mistake, and minimise the opportunity for those mistakes to happen again”.

Another big issue for DAUK is Brexit. “The vast majority of NHS workers I’m aware of, in the real world and online, feel that retaining our membership to the EU is the best things for the NHS”.

Read the full article below.