Did you know that over 3,000 people in the UK had a bone marrow or stem cell transplant in 2012? Around 1,400 of these were allograft transplants, where the patient receives blood stem cells from a donor — this could be from a sibling or an anonymous donor. Anthony Nolan is a pioneering charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancer and blood disorders. Every day, we use our register to match individuals willing to donate their bone marrow or blood stem cells to people who desperately need lifesaving transplants. But, for the patient, their journey doesn’t end at the point of transplant — a transplant patient is a patient for life and at Anthony Nolan we’re here to support those patients for as long as they need us.
What is a health visitor? What do they do? Indulge me for a moment and reflect on your immediate response to that question. Weighing babies was in there, wasn’t it? Don’t worry, you’re not alone — I recently asked a random sample of service users and healthcare professionals the same question and ‘weighing babies’ also featured highly in their perception of the health visitor’s role. Few could explain the role succinctly and most struggled to quantify exactly what it is we do. Indeed, my own health visitor colleagues had trouble explaining their jobs as they represent so many things to so many people.
This year, the global STOP Pressure Ulcer Day will take place on 20 November, 2014 with this day being set aside to bring awareness of the pain and suffering of the thousands of people who develop pressure ulcers each year.
The winners of the 2014 schülke hand hygiene champion awards were announced at the Infection Prevention Society (IPS) conference in Glasgow on 30 September. There were two joint winners — Mitch Clarke (Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham) and Claire Scott, (manager of the medical assessment unit, Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool) — who received exactly the same scores from the judges. The awards were presented by Julie Storr, the outgoing IPS president, on the 19schülke exhibition stand.
Beth Britton is a freelance campaigner and writer specialising in issues affecting older people, health and social care, and specifically dementia. Her father had vascular dementia for the last 19 years of his life and she aims to provide support and advice to those faced with similar situations, as well as informing healthcare professionals and the wider population on how to improve dementia services.
The majority of people express a wish to be cared for at home with the right support, but figures show that many are admitted to hospital in crisis and spend a significant amount of time in hospital in their last year. Plus, many more people die in hospital than really want to.
With reference to the JCN’s editorial on the ‘ticking public health time bomb’ and the role of nurses in tackling unhealthy lifestyles (www.jcn.co.uk/journal/04-2014), our research investigated the effect of professional football clubs in delivering health improvement in a traditionally hard-to reach but huge population — namely, men (Pringle et al, 2014).
Summer just seems to have got underway, but already practice nurses and GPs across the UK are dreading the onset of autumn as it can only mean one thing — flu vaccination. Flu vaccinations, and the associated clinics set up to deliver them, undoubtedly increase the already busy workload of practice nurses, however, they do represent a valuable service to all those who are eligible.
