Medical Centre

England is currently experiencing an outbreak of measles, with around 440 laboratory confirmed cases between January to May 2018. The outbreak is linked to ongoing outbreaks in Europe. Most cases are unimmunised teenagers and young adults. Children and young adults who did not receive MMR vaccine when they were younger, and people from under-vaccinated communities, are particularly at high risk.
Measles is a highly infectious illness that can sometimes cause serious complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis, and which can occasionally be fatal. Anyone who missed out on their Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine or is unsure if they had 2 doses should therefore ensure they are fully immunised.
The outbreak also reinforces the importance of parents to ensure their children receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, the first at around 12 months of age and the second around 3-4 years of age.

An article from Imperial College London published in the Lancet discusses vaccination from migrants in Europe. Ensuring high levels of coverage is a key priority of the European Vaccine Action Plan, whereby all WHO Europe Member States have committed to eliminating endemic measles and rubella (>95% coverage with the measles mumps rubella vaccine), sustaining polio-free status, and controlling hepatitis B infection.

Our recent paper in BMJ Open Gastroenterology examines trends in endoscopic, medical and surgical admissions for inflammatory bowel disease in England from 2003–2013. In the last decade, there have been major advances in inflammatory bowel disease management but their impact on hospital admissions requires evaluation. We aim to investigate nationwide trends in inflammatory bowel disease surgical/medical elective and emergency admissions, including endoscopy and cytokine inhibitor infusions, between 2003 and 2013.

We used Hospital Episode Statistics and population data from the UK Office for National Statistics. Age-sex standardised admission rates increased from 76.5 to 202.9/100 000. Rising inflammatory bowel disease hospital admission rates in the past decade have been driven by an increase in the incidence and prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease. Lower GI endoscopy and surgery rates have fallen, while cytokine inhibitor infusion rates have risen. There has been a concurrent s…

Health inequalities start very early in life. By the time of school reception year (4-5 years of age), children from the most deprived areas of England are twice as likely to be obese as children from the most affluent areas. This illustrates the importance of the implementing policies to improve health at a very early stage, starting before conception, continuing through pregnancy, and then into infancy and childhood.

See NHS Digital for further details.

Workforce and resource pressures in the UK National Health Service (NHS) mean that it is currently unable to meet patients’ expectations of access to primary care. In an era of near-instant electronic communication, with mobile online access available for most shopping and banking services, many people expect similar convenience in healthcare. Consequently, increasing numbers of web-based and smartphone apps now offer same-day ‘virtual consulting’ in the form of Internet video conferencing with private general practitioners.

While affordable and accessible private primary care may be attractive to many patients, the existence of these services raises several questions. A particular concern, given continued development of antimicrobial resistance, is that some companies appear to use ease of access to treatment with antibiotics as an advertising strategy. We examine online video consulting with private general practitioners in the UK, considering its potential impact on patients and t…

In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, we discuss the role that clinical pharmacists could play in primary care.

Primary care in the United Kingdom’s NHS is in crisis. Systematic underfunding, with specific neglect of primary care compared to other clinical specialties, has combined with ever-rising demand and administrative workload to place a now dwindling workforce under unsustainable pressure.

A major factor in the growing workload in primary care is prescribing. An aging population and higher prevalence of chronic diseases is leading to increased case complexity and polypharmacy, and consequently greater potential for prescribing errors. Nearly 5% of all prescriptions in general practices in England have prescribing or monitoring errors, while in some areas up to half of the prescriptions are prone to error. Although most errors are of mild or moderate severity, they can be life-changing for patients and costly for healthcare systems, accounting fo…

Dr Paul Morgan and I discuss deaths from sepsis in a letter published in the British Medical Journal. NHS England estimates that approximately 37 000 deaths a year are caused by sepsis.[1] This means that in the seven year period between 2011 and 2017, around 259 000 people died from sepsis in England. Only one of these deaths, that of Jack Adcock in Leicester in 2011, has resulted in the conviction of health professionals for manslaughter (Hadiza Bawa-Garba and Isabel Amaro).[2]

Sepsis can be difficult to diagnose, and delays and omissions in its diagnosis and treatment contribute to the high death rate. Even the former chair of the General Medical Council, Graham Catto, has admitted that he failed to diagnose sepsis in a timely manner, an error that contributed to a patient’s death.[3] Because of the problems diagnosing and treating sepsis, numerous initiatives have aimed to improve its management in both primary care and hospital settings. Details of one of the most recent of thes…