Hospital Blunders Double since 2006

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The latest Nationa Patient Safety Agency report (NPSA) has indicated that the number of reported incidents and near misses has risen by 96%. Of the 86,085 medication incidents only 100 resulted in serious harm and of which 37 resulted in a patient death.

Now the papers would jump up and down and consider that this increase a grave cause of concern. I differ. Given the millions of people that access healthcare it is only natural that there will be some human error. This makes the percentage of risk lower than the 0.04% risk of death from an incident reflected above.

What most of these incidents will be what are referred to as near misses, i.e a mistake picked up and detected through normal process. The rise in figures? Quite simply I see this as better reporting and this is something to be celebrated. It reflects more honest and transparent working by healthcare staff. This allows for discussion,  focused individual and improved staff training programmes. Moreover, due to something referred to as clincial governance, each department will generally review each incident that occurs per month. From this any learning that needs to be taken to reduce future risk of recurrence is acted upon. My prediction is that we won't see continuous rises in these figures

Big thighs might be in!!

Having just returned from holidays and a little over indulgence, I was rather pleased to learn that maybe there was hope for my thighs after all! It transpires that a study published in the BMJ has linked upper thigh size as an indicator of risk of heart disease and premature death. What it suggests is that those with thighs less 60cm diameter are at a greater risk of heart disease than somebody with large thighs. But before you get too excited, those with thighs much wider than 60 cms (23.5 inches) didn't fair much better either. So the parameters seem quite limited.

It would seem that smaller thighs have less muscle mass, which can put you at risk of developing type-2 diabetes. As with all research, what is normally required is more research to see if the results can consistently be reproduced preferrably in a larger cohort of people. But this is no small research study taking over 12 years following 2811 men and women. Indeed it is likely that GP's will adopt this as another indicator for risk. This because it is simple and easy to measure in a practice setting. This means it will be 1 contributary factor taken along side other factors such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure and familt history again, to establish a risk profile for the patient.

The underlying message coming through to me is another reinforcement that we do need to ensure we exercise regularly to preserve health, so I'm just going to dig out my trainers and work off my holiday excess as a priority.

RCN - Neutral towards assisted suicide

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The Royal College of Nursing has taken the same stance as the medics' British Medical Association briefly also previously took, to neither support or oppose a change in the law over assisted suicide. The decison reached after nursing members showed no strong preference for either stance.

The law surrounding this is complicated and the subject highly contentious. Nurses will not want to compromise care and this result is probably a mix of the need to protect vulnerable adults whilst also supporting a dignified end of life experience.

However this could have a significant addition to the debate that a professional group so heavily involved in the care of terminally ill and dying patients would not have a strong and hardened view to oppose it. Indeed it could be reflective of a change in public opinion in general.

Detailed guidance will now need to be drawn up to consider the clinical frameworks and ethics of assisted suicide. In the meantime given that the recent unsuccesful attempt to change the law and the BMA now firmly against the legalisation, it not likely anything will change in the near future, something the RCN will have been all too aware of when the made this announcement I'm sure.