I remember meeting her at breakfast in a rather ramshackle colonial hotel in India - a riot of colour and fun

Haven’t posted here for a long time but such a relief after The Other Place .

If hospital to community & virtual wards & stuff going to work you have to have enough “decision makers” ( and non medical prescribers) and you need experienced embedded people to hold the ring, while joining up the various patient record and IT systems takes place - which can be painfully slow

A lexis diagram - essentially a heatmap showing rates of death from transport accidents by age and over time from 2001-2024 in Scotland. For men in the 2000s there was a clear peak in deaths at ages 15-35 (plus a smaller one in the oldest age groups). But around 2010 this basically disappeared, and now all age groups have similarly, much lower, rates of transport accident deaths. For women the pattern is similar, albeit at a much lower level, except that in the early 2000s there were more deaths in older, rather than younger adults.

I was looking at some Scottish cause of death data yesterday and the extent to which transport accident deaths in young men have all but disappeared is pretty remarkable.

Nice to find a good news story in this data for a change.

Your periodic reminder that mRNA vaccines are a scientific and public health game-changer. Those that have been approved have passed stringent efficacy and safety checks. They protect you and your child against potentially fatal diseases. You may, however, get a sore arm.

Please know that NHS doctors & nurses like me would never urge you to do something that could endanger your child.

Really reliable NHS info on vaccines can be found here.

Please read, it’s excellent. (2/3)

nhs.uk/vaccinations/

Looking back to move forward: what can other countries’ Covid experiences tell us about building a resilient care system? As the Hallett Inquiry turns its focus to social care this week, this blog draws on a set of international case studies being published by Nuffield Trust and LSE's Care Policy and Evaluation Centre…

There's a lot that England's social care sector can learn from Covid-19, both from the experience here and from that of other countries.

Read the blog from @natashacurry.bsky.social for the four key building blocks of a resilient social care system, based on our research findings.

buff.ly/5H8bmXp

Plenty studies showing that your postcode is a better predictor of your health outcomes than your genome.

I learned American history through Batman and superman comics

Welcome to my world. #academicsky

Bradford project produces ‘outstanding’ rise in children’s physical activity JU:MP programme included co-design of play spaces, exercise in faith settings and interventions in schools

More of this please.

Co-designing play spaces with children and young people near their homes led to “what researchers say is the highest increase in children’s physical activity ever recorded by an intervention of its kind”

Don’t forget radiation induced brachialplexopathy

Went there a few weeks ago - wonderful

Watch puffins live | Farne Islands webcam Watch rare live footage of puffins and other clifftop birds with our Farne Islands wildlife webcam; livestreaming for the breeding season.

Loving this live webcam of puffins from the Farne Islands @nationaltrust.org.uk
Via @oohgpwales.bsky.social

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/vir...

If hospital to community & virtual wards & stuff going to work you have to have enough “decision makers” ( and non medical prescribers) and you need experienced embedded people to hold the ring, while joining up the various patient record and IT systems takes place - which can be painfully slow

Totally agree

Landscape assessment of patient-reported outcome item coverage of tyrosine kinase inhibitor-associated AEs AbstractBackground. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are critical for assessing symptomatic adverse events (AEs) in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) clin

EORTC effectively captures tyrosine kinase inhibitor side effects, outperforming other patient-reported outcome libraries in non-small-cell lung cancer assessments.

by Paton EL, Cetnar JP (...) King-Kallimanis BL et 2 al. in J Natl Cancer Inst #MedSky

👉 get more here

📖 read the article:

Unplanned acute illness and cancer should often be the trigger for new conversations - #seeitsayitshareit

As palliative &EOL care becomes increasingly community based is it time to reconsider a route into the specialty palliative medicine via general practice? Community based palliative medicine training without such a long acute medicine commitment ? @johnlauner.bsky.social @danmunday.bsky.social

Episode 198: The increasing digitalisation of general practice systems – how it’s impacting patients and what we can do about it In this episode, we talk to Professor Helen Atherton about the increasing push for a digital-first approach in general practice.

As #generalpractice takes an increasingly 'digital first' approach, it's important to know how practices are facilitating access to these services - I talk to Helen Atherton here on the @bjgp.bsky.social podcast about the impact on practices and patients
bjgplife.com/episode-198-...

Now, this is a really important session. Continuing Healthcare is relatively unknown, complex, and yet has a massive impact on individuals. Juliet Bouverie, Chair of the Richmond Group warns us that we're going to get cross. #NTSummit

“Advancements in cancer treatment have led to a growing population of cancer survivors worldwide, who often experience premature onset of age-related conditions”

#LivingWithAndBeyondCancer

Several Popes have been very supportive of the concept of palliative care but perhaps less so the personal application during their own illnesses . Recognising when palliative care can help (eg sick enough to die ) even though active treatment continuing #palliative

Yes, I was asking this question a few days ago, hoping that he’s getting relevant support from a geriatrician or similar physician, not just people tasked with keeping him alive at all costs.

(Good palliative care can as we know actually prolong life rather than shorten it…)

But I wonder if he would see it’s value for himself ?

Palliative care sign of compassion, hope for the dying, pope says In a messageto an international interfaith symposium on palliative care, Pope Francis highlights how true compassion involves accompanying the suffering, not ending lives, and stressed the need for pa...

Here's what #PopeFrancis has said about palliative care.
international.la-croix.com/ethics/palli...

News Researchers could soon access GP patient data—how will it work? BMJ 2025; 388 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r375 (Published 21 February 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;388:r375 Article Related content Metrics Responses Elisabeth Mahase Author affiliations Nearly 18 months after NHS England announced its intention to allow scientists to analyse general practice data for research, the scheme finally looks set to go ahead. Elisabeth Mahase examines how it will work and whether privacy concerns have been met What has been announced? NHS England has said that it is actively working with GPs’ leaders to prepare for sharing of GP patient data, through the OpenSAFELY system, with select researchers. This could potentially happen within months. Do researchers currently have access to GP data? Deidentified patient data from general practices in Scotland and Wales are available for research, but this is largely not the case in England. However, an exception has been made in recent years in relation to covid-19. Early in the pandemic the government issued a “control of patient information” (COPI) notice, which gave researchers access to deidentified patient data, but only for covid-19 research.1 What is OpenSAFELY? OpenSAFELY is a software platform that enables researchers to analyse electronic health record data in England, including GP patient records for the whole population of 58 million—but currently only for covid related work. Developed in the early months of the pandemic,2 it is a collaboration between the University of Oxford’s Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, NHS England, and GP system suppliers such as EMIS Health and TPP. Speaking at a media briefing on 19 February, Ben Goldacre, director of the Bennett Institute, said, “OpenSAFELY began during the pandemic, motivated by the need for enormous population level data that we had to have flowing at unprecedented scale but also unprecedented speed.” …

Great piece in The BMJ @bmj.com about our OpenSAFELY platform granting unprecedented secure, transparent, efficient access to whole population GP data for analysts in collaboration with NHS England @england.nhs.uk
www.bmj.com/content/388/...

But previous popes have been quite resistant to palliative care which I always found curious

RIP Roberta Flack - songs of youth #killingmesoftly