Resources

This article gives a brief overview of blood disorders affecting older adults. The conditions covered within the article vary widely in their symptoms and presentation, their severity and impact on the affected person’s quality of life. Treatment options and prognosis are also very different for each condition covered, depending on the disease the patient has. Some patients are able to live a normal life once treatment has started, while for others their disease carries a far less positive outcome and a poorer prognosis. This article hopes to improve knowledge and understanding of the conditions discussed with the aim of giving community nurses and non-medical prescribers more confidence when advising patients with any of the diseases discussed.

Here, Pauline MacDonald, independent consultant nurse; managing director, Infection Matters, talks about the COVID-19 vaccination programme, with some useful information to help community nurses feel confident and competent to discuss vaccination with their patients, relatives, friends and colleagues.

When the first lockdown hit in 2020, the founders of #mhTV quickly realised that activities to celebrate the Year of the Nurse and Midwife and highlight the amazing work done within nursing were not going to go as planned. They could feel the energy start to slip away and wanted to do something to keep communities of learning and practice connected and tackle the isolation they saw developing through the possibilities of social media. Together, they created the plan for #mhTV, an online programme for conversations on mental health, which was launched in May 2020 with a discussion on kindness in health care to celebrate mental health awareness week.