The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Mhra Alerts listing page.
UK medicines and medical device safety alerts, recalls and safety-signal bulletins published by the MHRA on GOV.UK. Keyless.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.
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.
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_type accepts one of five slugs (document counts observed 2026-09-13, 1,440 alerts total):
| slug | what it is | count |
|---|---|---|
field-safety-notices | Field Safety Notices from device manufacturers, published weekly | 615 |
medicines-recall-notification | Class 1–4 medicines recalls and defect notifications, with affected batches | 587 |
device-safety-information | MHRA safety information about a device already on the market | 203 |
mhra-safety-round-up | periodic MHRA round-up of device and medicine safety issues | 18 |
national-patient-safety | National Patient Safety Alerts requiring NHS-wide action | 17 |
None. The GOV.UK Search and Content APIs are open and unauthenticated.
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.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.filter_alert_type=zzz-nonsense returns 0 rather than the unfiltered set. A zero really is a zero.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.https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json — https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/repos/search-api.htmlhttps://www.gov.uk/api/content/ — https://content-api.publishing.service.gov.uk/Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mhra-alerts/mcp returns the tools in the table
above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx,
discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.
This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.
Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/mhra_safety_alerts. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.
This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:
Or run it directly to confirm it starts:
It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call
for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway
connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.
Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
MIT