Sapphire Medical Clinics and CLINN have been chosen by Canex as the very first winners of the ‘Best Medicinal Cannabis Clinic’ Award in the UK and Europe, respectively.
Our readers will have met with Sapphire for a few times over the last few years – most recently in October when they announced the launch of their new programme in the national media.
Sapphire’s Medical Director and Pain consultant Dr Michael Platt announced on BBC News that the clinic had become the first in the UK to offer access to a new range of low-cost UK manufactured medical cannabis products.
In the report, Dr Platt cited research that revealed there could be more than 1.4 million patients in the UK who were forced to buy their medicines from black market sources as medicinal cannabis products are often too expensive.
At Sapphire, treatment with medical cannabis aims to keep patients away from the black market and provide them with high quality and affordable cannabis-based medicines.
In their new programme, a typical chronic pain patient pays only £4.76 per day for medical cannabis treatment.
Dr Platt added: “As treatment becomes more affordable, we hope this provides an immediate solution for those patients who would otherwise benefit from medicinal cannabis but have previously been unable to afford the associated costs of treatment.
“At Sapphire Clinics, all patients are added to the UK Medical Cannabis Registry and our Real-World Data platform contributing to the growing evidence base.
“This data will ultimately help guide the availability of free treatment on the NHS in appropriate conditions.”
For more information about the work the team does at Sapphire, please visit their website.
Europe
While we found the race between the European clinics were a little bit tighter, eventually we chose to name CLINN in Milan as the ‘Best Medicinal Cannabis Clinic in Europe’.
CLINN, which is a self-proclaimed integrated medicine centre, specialised in anaesthesia and pain therapy, nutrition, cancer therapy, psychotherapy, counselling, each with an intensive clinical experience in the management of the therapy with cannabinoids.
In their agenda, they state that they are convinced that “cannabis is a valuable support for integrative therapies and we decided to use it as part of a personalised medical project.”
Their unique initiative, the Patient Support Scheme – CLINN per te, or ‘CLINN for you’ – is a health counselling service.
At CLINN, patients are looked after by specialised doctors and an internal pharmacist, who is there “to guarantee a steady supply of medications for the patients.”
The initiative has two phases – from the visit to monitoring and from monitoring to scheduled check-ups – which ensure that the patient’s need is satisfied during the whole time of the treatment.
Should you wish to read more about CLINN, and the initiatives they run, check out their website.
