@pipeworx/mhra-alerts

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mhra-alerts/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 3

UK medicines and medical device safety alerts, recalls and safety-signal bulletins published by the MHRA on GOV.UK. Keyless.

Companion to @pipeworx/mhra-uk, which covers MHRA product documents (SmPC, PIL, PAR) — what a licensed medicine is and what its label says. This pack covers what went wrong with one: batch recalls, field safety notices, device safety information and prescriber safety advice.

Tools

• mhra_safety_alerts(query?, alert_type?, issued_from?, issued_to?, specialism?, sort?, limit?, offset?) — search MHRA drug and device safety alerts. Returns title, alert category, issue date, summary and GOV.UK URL.
• mhra_alert_detail(url) — full text of one alert or Drug Safety Update article, as plain text. For a medicines recall this carries the affected batch numbers and expiry dates, the PL number, the active ingredient, the recall class and the required action.
• mhra_drug_safety_update(query?, published_from?, published_to?, limit?, offset?) — articles from Drug Safety Update, the MHRA monthly prescriber bulletin (new contraindications, updated warnings, monitoring advice).

Alert categories

alert_type accepts one of five slugs (document counts observed 2026-09-13, 1,440 alerts total):

Auth

None. The GOV.UK Search and Content APIs are open and unauthenticated.

Upstream behaviour worth knowing

• Errors are HTML, not JSON. A bad filter value, an unknown order or a malformed date returns HTTP 422 with a full GOV.UK error page. The pack validates alert_type and every date up front and never hands a non-JSON body to a caller.
• order=-issued_date is rejected (422). public_timestamp is the only sortable field, and the two disagree: the FSN roundup issued 2026-08-31 was published 2026-09-09, so “newest published” and “newest issued” return different leaders. sort is therefore an argument. newest_issued (the default) sorts the 500 most recently published matches by issue date and reports sort_covered_all_matches so a partial ordering is never presented as a complete one; narrowing with issued_from/issued_to makes it complete.
• With no q and no order, results come back by relevance, which for an empty query is effectively arbitrary — a “recent alerts” call written without an explicit order returns 2022 articles above 2026 ones and still looks sorted. Order is always set explicitly.
• Filters here are honest, which is worth recording because it is not the norm: filter_alert_type=zzz-nonsense returns 0 rather than the unfiltered set. A zero really is a zero.
• Weekly Field Safety Notice roundups link out to PDFs hosted off GOV.UK, so mhra_alert_detail on one of those returns the roundup page rather than individual manufacturer notices. Medicines recalls and device safety information carry their full content inline.

Data sources

• Search API: https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json — https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/repos/search-api.html
• Content API: https://www.gov.uk/api/content/ — https://content-api.publishing.service.gov.uk/
• Publisher: Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), https://www.gov.uk/drug-device-alerts

Tools

• mhra_safety_alerts — UK medicines and medical device safety alerts published by the MHRA on GOV.UK: Class 1-4 medicines recalls with affected batch numbers, Field Safety Notices from device manufacturers, device safety in
• mhra_alert_detail — Full text of one MHRA safety alert or recall from GOV.UK, given the alert URL or path returned by mhra_safety_alerts. Returns the complete notice as plain text — for a medicines recall that means the
• mhra_drug_safety_update — Articles from Drug Safety Update, the MHRA monthly bulletin that tells UK prescribers about new safety signals: new contraindications, updated warnings, restricted indications and monitoring advice fo