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The article offers various developments taking place in the field of medicine in Great Britain. It is reported that, a woman from the Republic of Ireland has won a court case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against the restrictive abortion legislation of Ireland, to go for abortion. The government of Great Britain, as reported, had issued a white paper in July 2010 indicating that it will bring a value-based pricing policy for medicines by the year 2014.

In June 2008 the UK government, supported by the Royal College of Nursing, stated that nursing care would be measured for compassion. This paper considers the implications of this statement by critically examining the relationship of compassion to care from a variety of perspectives. It is argued that the current market-driven approaches to healthcare involve redefining care as a pale imitation, even parody, of the traditional approach of the nurse as "my brother's keeper". Attempts to measure such parody can only measure artificial techniques and give rise to a McDonald's-type nursing care rather than heartfelt care. The arguments of this paper, although applied to nursing, also apply to medicine and healthcare generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]