The use of compression hosiery is commonplace in the community. Traditionally, compression hosiery has been used to prevent leg ulceration, including prevention of the recurrence of leg ulcers and skin breakdown after ulcers have healed (Nelson and Bell-Syer, 2012).
It’s that time of year again where Christmas is a distant memory and the longer evenings start to bring thoughts of summer. Unfortunately, the first shoots of spring also stir the fear of allergies in many of us. Allergies have become a widespread phenomenon and at any one time can affect one-in-four people in the UK. Common allergic conditions include hay fever, asthma, atopic eczema and food allergies, and many of these become worse in the spring/summer months.
Did you know that over 3,000 people in the UK had a bone marrow or stem cell transplant in 2012? Around 1,400 of these were allograft transplants, where the patient receives blood stem cells from a donor — this could be from a sibling or an anonymous donor. Anthony Nolan is a pioneering charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancer and blood disorders. Every day, we use our register to match individuals willing to donate their bone marrow or blood stem cells to people who desperately need lifesaving transplants. But, for the patient, their journey doesn’t end at the point of transplant — a transplant patient is a patient for life and at Anthony Nolan we’re here to support those patients for as long as they need us.
What is a health visitor? What do they do? Indulge me for a moment and reflect on your immediate response to that question. Weighing babies was in there, wasn’t it? Don’t worry, you’re not alone — I recently asked a random sample of service users and healthcare professionals the same question and ‘weighing babies’ also featured highly in their perception of the health visitor’s role. Few could explain the role succinctly and most struggled to quantify exactly what it is we do. Indeed, my own health visitor colleagues had trouble explaining their jobs as they represent so many things to so many people.
This year, the global STOP Pressure Ulcer Day will take place on 20 November, 2014 with this day being set aside to bring awareness of the pain and suffering of the thousands of people who develop pressure ulcers each year.
The winners of the 2014 schülke hand hygiene champion awards were announced at the Infection Prevention Society (IPS) conference in Glasgow on 30 September. There were two joint winners — Mitch Clarke (Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham) and Claire Scott, (manager of the medical assessment unit, Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool) — who received exactly the same scores from the judges. The awards were presented by Julie Storr, the outgoing IPS president, on the 19schülke exhibition stand.
