While nutrition is important throughout life, it is particularly vital that infants get off to a good start. Here, JCN looks at the knowledge community nurses need to provide best practice...
With all the things community nurses need to think about when visiting patients — continence status; support from friends and family; wound care; smoking cessation, to name but a few — it is easy to see how nutritional status might come some way down the list. After all, it’s pretty easy to tell if a patient is dangerously underweight or drifting into obesity isn’t it? All you have to do is look at them...
Working in a large organisation like the NHS means that patients’ voices can be forgotten. JCN speaks to Anu Singh of NHS England about how to keep the lines of communication open...
The quality of nutrition provision in nursing homes can often seem like an afterthought. Natalie Welsh, a nutrition specialist nurse at Tameside Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, explains how we can improve...
The referendum to decide whether the UK should leave or remain in the European Union is being held on Thursday 23 June, 2016 and we all have a vote. But what does this mean for the NHS and, most importantly, what effect will this have on nurses and the current recruitment crisis?
At the Cavell Nurses’ Trust, we believe you are all heroes. The care, compassion and courage shown by nurses in the UK every day is staggering and very humbling to those of us not involved directly in nursing.
In the UK there are currently tens of thousands of blind and visionimpaired ex-servicemen and women battling sight loss without the specialist support available to them from charities like Blind Veterans UK.
Here at The Brain Tumour Charity, we have two main goals: to double brain tumour survival and halve the harm caused by the disease. These goals are urgently needed and yet, for those living with a brain tumour, they must seem a distant dream.
One of the commonest autoimmune conditions, coeliac disease is an immune-mediated condition that is triggered by the ingestion of gluten in those who have a genetic susceptibility and can result in intestinal inflammation and irritation. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. Coeliac disease has a prevalence in England of 1%, with a diagnosed prevalence of 0.24% (West et al, 2014). It is estimated that 75% of coeliac disease is undiagnosed and the condition is often misdiagnosed by healthcare professionals, with one in four people with coeliac disease having previously been treated for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) (Card et al, 2013).
As the vast majority of you will already know, revalidation has now become a reality. From 1 April, 2016, every nurse and midwife will have to demonstrate their ability to meet the standards of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) code through the revalidation process.
There are around 900,000 young people under the age of 19 in the UK with bowel and bladder problems, equating to one in 12 of this age group (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE], 2010). These problems, which include daytime wetting, nighttime wetting, constipation and soiling, can have significant impacts on the emotional wellbeing of sufferers, with those affected — both young people and their parents or carers — reporting feelings of shame, embarrassment and fear of being found out’. This in turn can lead to low self-esteem, isolation, anxiety, and in some cases depression.
