Congratulations to Dr Diarmuid Quinlan, a GP in Cork and MPS clinical risk assessment facilitator, and his colleague, GP and pharmacist Dr Paul Ryan, who won the Quality in Practice (QIP) award at the ICGP annual conference in Galway in May.

Their winning entry was a patient-held alert card to improve the safe prescribing, usage and monitoring of methotrexate. Ireland has four times the UK adverse event rate for patients using methotrexate. The pair wrote about their study in the January 2013 edition of Casebook.

MPS has been actively involved along with other stakeholders in the drafting stages of this important Bill.

The purpose of the Bill is to ensure that medical practitioners have indemnity or insurance arrangements in place.

The Bill is expected to be published this year.