Medical Centre

You are called by a worker at a care home. She is concerned about a dementia patient who, despite all non-drug measures being tried, is causing distress to other residents. She asks you to prescribe a sedative to ‘slip into her food’. How should you proceed? Giving medication covertly to sedate an agitated patient raises serious legal and ethical issues. Treatment without consent is only permissible where there is a legal basis for this. In the scenario described here, giving a sedative to the patient without her knowledge and consent would be a breach of her human rights. There is also a risk that the patient could suffer side effects from the medication she was given. For example, administration of a benzodiazepine or an antipsychotic drug could lead to a fall or a fracture that resulted in serious harm to the patient. Covert administration of medication is also a breach of trust on the part of the doctor who prescribed the medication. Hence, it may lead to a formal complaint agai...

Although randomized control trials (RCTs) are the ‘gold standard’ to evaluate treatment effects in health care, they are frequently not practical, ethical or politically acceptable in the evaluation of many health system or public health interventions. In the absence of an RCT, evaluations often use quasi-experimental designs such as a pre-post study design with measurements before and after the intervention period, such as interupted time series (ITS). An ITS compares the intercept and slope of the regression line before the intervention with the intercept and slope after intervention. A one-time baseline effect of the intervention without influencing the secular trend can be detected as an intercept change. If the intervention changed the secular trend, there will also be a significant difference in the slope between the two periods. Use of ITS in biomedical research is described in more detail in an article published by Utz Pape and colleagues in the  Journal of the Royal Socie...

Factors that need to be considered in discharge planning that have been identified in previous projects include: Ensuring that discharge arrangements are discussed with patients, family members and carers; and that they are given a copy of the discharge summary. Adequate coordination between the hospital, community health services, general practices, and the providers of social care services. There is a follow-up after discharge of patients at high risk of complications or readmission - either in person or by telephone - to ensure that the discharge arrangements are working well.  Medicines reconciliation is carried out. This is the process of verifying patient medication lists at a point-of-care transition, such as hospital discharge, to identify which medications have been added, discontinued, or changed from pre-admission medication lists. Ensuring that any outstanding test results at discharge are obtained and passed on to primary care teams; and ensuring there are clea...

The consequences of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union (EU) will be wide-ranging. As a member of the EU for over 40 years, the UK is fully linked with Europe in all sectors of its society. This includes the UK’s life sciences sector, which faces  major risks  if it fails to address the challenges that Brexit poses. The UK’s life sciences sector includes the National Health Service (NHS), the UK’s universities and medical schools, the pharmaceutical sector, and the medical devices industry. With over one million employees, and an annual spend of over £100 billion, the NHS is England’s largest employer. For many decades, the NHS has faced shortages in its clinical workforce and has relied heavily on overseas trained doctors, nurses and other health professionals to fill these gaps. This reliance on overseas-trained staff will not end in the foreseeable future. For example, although the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, has announced that the g...

Dementia care is predominantly provided by carers in home settings. We aimed to identify the priorities for homecare safety of people with dementia according to dementia health and social care professionals using a novel priority-setting method. The study was published in BMC Geriatrics . The project steering group determined the scope, the context and the criteria for prioritization. We then invited 185 North-West London clinicians via an open-ended questionnaire to identify three main problems and solutions relating to homecare safety of people with dementia. 76 clinicians submitted their suggestions which were thematically synthesized into a composite list of 27 distinct problems and 30 solutions. A group of 49 clinicians arbitrarily selected from the initial cohort ranked the composite list of suggestions using predetermined criteria. Inadequate education of carers of people with dementia (both family and professional) is seen as a key problem that needs addressing in addition...