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Stockport NHS Foundation Trust ends the “silent era” with CardMedic roll-out

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Stockport NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with CardMedic across the organisation, enabling its 6,300-strong workforce to communicate more clearly and confidently with patients who face language or communication barriers.

CardMedic is a digital healthcare communication platform that allows staff and patients to communicate safely and effectively irrespective of language barriers, cognitive impairment or literacy.

The platform provides instant access to live interpreters in 200+ languages via Language Line, alongside thousands of clinically validated scripts in multiple languages and formats, including British Sign Language (BSL), Easy Read, and Read Aloud.

It also supports health literacy for same language patients by explaining information in plain language, clearly and succinctly.

The Trust provides acute and community health services to a population of around 300,000 people across Stockport.

Pam Fearns, Chief Nursing Information Officer at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, led the project’s implementation.

“CardMedic will enable patients to voice their needs where previously they may have struggled to communicate them,” she said.

“All conversations — such as asking whether someone wants a cup of tea, explaining a procedure, or offering reassurance — play a vital role in ensuring inclusivity.

“CardMedic enables equality across our services.”

With a diverse community, reliance on face-to-face interpreting has led to rapidly increasing annual costs, and communication barriers have increasingly impacted patient experience and safety.

Introducing CardMedic will help address these pressures by providing staff with a single point of access to a suite of clinically designed communication support tools.

The cost-effective, vendor-agnostic platform connects staff to the Trust’s existing language service providers via its Call an Interpreter feature, accessible on any device and any location.

Streamlined access will reduce use of disparate and ad hoc solutions, empowering staff to deliver more efficient and equitable care.

This groundbreaking collaboration will see CardMedic deployed across 455 SPARK Fusion® patient bedside devices on 20 wards at the Trust’s Stepping Hill Hospital.

This integration brings universal communication support directly to the bedside, giving patients and clinicians greater access, privacy, speed, and confidence in every interaction.

The Trust has taken a “big bang” approach to launching CardMedic, introducing it across all its acute and community settings. From day one, it has been available in all inpatient areas to maximise reach and equity of access.

Key areas of engagement include emergency, maternity, and acute medical units, supported by digital nurses, midwives, and clinical champions across the organisation.

The rollout also extends to community staff, including community midwives, school nurses, allied healthcare professionals, Macmillan nurses and district nurses.

The launch is backed by an extensive communications campaign using the slogan ‘the silent era is over’.

This term was coined by Karen Lawrence in the Digital Skills Team following discussions with the Digital Nursing Team about giving a voice to the “silent patient”.

This gave her the idea of silent movies in black and white. Now the introduction of CardMedic is bringing colour back to these patients as they are no longer silenced.

The rollout reflects the Trust’s commitment to its core CARE values of Compassion, Accountability, Respect, and Excellence.

It also aligns with regional efforts to reduce inequalities and national priorities such as the Patient safety healthcare inequalities reduction framework, the Accessible Information Standard, and the Core20PLUS5 Health Inequalities Programme.

The Trust’s passion for equitable care is evident throughout the partnership.

The top five non-English languages spoken in the local area are Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Kurdish Sorani, and Cantonese. To support the Trust’s community, CardMedic is adding Kurdish Sorani to its platform for the first time.

Dr Rachael Grimaldi, CEO and Co-Founder of CardMedic, said: “Stockport NHS Foundation Trust has demonstrated what equitable care in action looks like.

“No patient will be left without a voice in their care.

“By embedding CardMedic across wards and bedside devices, enabled through our partnership with SPARK TSL, they’re enabling communication that is instant, safe, and scalable.

“The partnership won’t just improve care for patients who face a language barrier. With CardMedic’s Easy Read and Read Aloud formats, it also helps support improved health literacy when language isn’t the main issue.”

Jane Stephenson, CEO at SPARK TSL, added: “This pioneering project demonstrates how technology can strengthen patient-centred care.

“ We’re proud to be working with Stockport NHS Foundation Trust and CardMedic on embedding inclusive communication support in our SPARK Fusion® bedside devices.

“Together, we’re making healthcare more accessible for all.”

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Condé Nast to close women’s health magazine after 47 years

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Condé Nast will close its women’s health publication Self after 47 years, with unprofitable editions of Glamour and Wired also set to shut.

In a memo published on the magazine giant’s website on Thursday, the media company’s chief executive, Roger Lynch, said: “As audience behaviours shift, we have not seen a path for Self to continue in its current form as a digital publication.”

“Going forward, health and wellness content will be integrated into our other brands, including Allure and Glamour,” Lynch said, referring to Condé Nast’s other beauty and wellness titles.

Self, which moved to an online-only format in 2017, still reaches more than 20m people each month.

The publication has also earned significant recognition over the years, including a National Magazine award and a Webby’s People’s Voice award.

The closure is part of a wider set of operational changes across the company. Lynch also announced the end of Wired’s Italy edition, noting that while the brand “remains a strong global brand, the Italian edition has not kept pace with growth in our other markets”.

Condé Nast will also wind down Glamour’s publishing operations in Germany, Spain and Mexico.

Lynch said: “Taken together, Wired in Italy, Self and the affected Glamour markets represent a little over 1 per cent of our overall revenue.

“They also remain unprofitable, and continuing to operate them in their current form limits our ability to invest in the ideas and areas that will drive future growth.”

Beyond editorial changes, the company is also restructuring internally to adapt to technological shifts.

Lynch said Condé Nast would make “changes within our technology organisation, reflecting the rapid advancement of AI and its impact on our ability to innovate and build products faster”, adding: “Teams will be restructured to be more agile and to work more closely with our brands and customers, reducing barriers to execution.”

The latest moves follow a series of transformations at Condé Nast in recent years.

Glamour ended its print edition in 2018, followed by Allure moving to a digital-only format in 2022.

In 2024, music publication Pitchfork was folded into GQ, the company’s men’s style magazine.

More recently, last November, Vogue, one of Condé Nast’s key revenue drivers, announced it would absorb Teen Vogue to create a more “unified reader experience across titles”.

The media industry has been shrinking steadily over the years.

From 2010 to 2017, the industry lost an average of 7,305 jobs annually, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas published in December 2025.

Since 2018, the average number of job cuts in the industry has risen to 14,298 a year.

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GSK ovarian and womb cancer drug shows promise in early trial

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GSK said its ovarian cancer drug shrank or cleared tumours in more than 60 per cent of patients in an early trial as CCO Luke Miels pushes faster development.

The company said that in an early-stage trial, Mocertatug Rezetecan, known as Mo-Rez, shrank or eliminated tumours in 62 per cent of patients with ovarian cancer after chemotherapy had failed, and in 67 per cent of those with endometrial cancer.

Hesham Abdullah, GSK’s global head of cancer research and development, said: “Treatment of gynaecological cancers remains a major challenge, with a pressing need for new therapies that offer improved response rates.

“With Mo-Rez we now have compelling evidence of a promising clinical profile.”

GSK acquired the Mo-Rez treatment, an antibody-drug conjugate, from China’s Hansoh Pharma in late 2023 and has trialled it in 224 patients around the world, including the UK, over the past year.

Only a few patients needed to stop treatment because of side effects, the most common being nausea.

It is given every three weeks by intravenous infusion, meaning directly into a vein.

Combined with data from a separate intermediate trial in China, the results have given the British drugmaker the confidence to go straight to late-stage trials, with five clinical studies planned globally in the next few months, including on patients in the UK.

Speaking to journalists before the conference, Abdullah described Mo-Rez as a “key asset” in the company’s growing cancer portfolio.

It is expected to be a blockbuster drug, with peak annual sales of more than £2bn, which GSK hopes will help it achieve its 2031 sales target of £40bn.

A few years ago GSK did not have any cancer drugs on the market, but it now has four approved medicines and 13 in clinical development.

Last year, oncology generated nearly £2bn in sales, up 43 per cent from 2024, with sales of its endometrial cancer drug Jemperli rising 89 per cent.

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Self-employment linked to better cardiovascular health outcomes in Hispanic women

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Self-employment is linked to lower rates of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, poor health and binge drinking in Hispanic women, research suggests.

The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnicity & Disease, suggest work structure may be related to cardiovascular disease risk among this group.

Dr Kimberly Narain is assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, senior author of the study, and director of health services and health optimisation research for the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center.

She said: “Hispanic women experience a disproportionate burden of heart disease compared to non-Hispanic women. This is the first study to link the structure of work with risks for heart disease among this group of women.”

The researchers examined 2003 to 2022 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to assess the association between self-employment, cardiovascular disease risk factors and health outcomes for Hispanic women.

The data included 165,600 Hispanic working women. Of those, about 21,000, or 13 per cent, were self-employed rather than working for wages or a salary.

Overall, the researchers found that self-employed women were less likely to report cardiovascular-disease-associated health problems.

They were also about 11 per cent more likely to report exercising compared with their non-self-employed counterparts.

Specifically, they found that self-employed Hispanic women had a 1.7 percentage point lower chance of reporting diabetes, roughly a 23 per cent decline.

They also had a 3.3 percentage point lower chance of reporting hypertension, roughly a 17 per cent decline.

The study also found a 5.9 percentage point lower chance of reporting obesity, roughly a 15 per cent decline.

It found a 2.0 percentage point lower chance of reporting binge drinking, roughly a 2 per cent decline.

It also found a 2.5 percentage point lower chance of reporting poor or fair overall health, roughly a 13 per cent decline.

The relationship between heart disease risks and the structure of work among Hispanic women was not driven by access to healthcare or differences in income, Narain said.

In fact, the decrease in high blood pressure linked to self-employment was nearly as large as the decrease in high blood pressure linked to being in the highest income group.

The study has some limitations.

The researchers relied on self-reported outcomes, which might be less reliable among ethnic and racial minorities and those from a lower socioeconomic background.

In addition, the researchers’ definition of poor mental health does not entirely match the accepted definition in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

They also did not have data allowing them to examine the specific types of occupations held by the women.

The study design also cannot prove any causal relationship between self-employment and cardiovascular disease risk, which is a subject the researchers will explore.

“The next step in the research is to conduct studies that are able to better assess if the structure of work is a cause of higher heart disease risks among Hispanic women.”

Narain said this.

Study co-authors are Lisette Collins, who led the research, and Dr Frederick Ferguson of UCLA.

Grants from the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center-Leichtman-Levine-TEM program and the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program supported the research.

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