How to … be a jolly good fellow

Elinor Burn is a Department of Medicine for the Elderly (DME) and Quality Improvement (QI) fellow at the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust, in this blog article reflects on her year in post.

Taking a step off the conveyer belt of medical training can be a daunting move for trainees, who have become accustomed to the continued encouragement for career progression. It’s a choice that is not actively encouraged, but does allow(s) space to refocus through dedicated time doing a different kind of work.

After crawling to the end of my core medical training feeling exhausted, I took on this year as a chance to change gear, step back and remember why I enjoy and chose to do medicine. By filling this fellowship post I accepted the challenge of taking forward a service design programme. This has been in the form of a surgical liaison service, a project still in its infancy. It was a steep learning curve – service development is something that I’ve never actually been taught to do.

Forging international links, sharing ideas and developing friendships to build research collaborations

Dr Jenni Burton (@JenniKBurton) from the University of Edinburgh and Dr Patrick Wachholz (@Patrick23711608) from Sao Paulo State University joined 12 researchers from across the UK and 17 from across Brazil to participate in a Newton Fund researcher links workshop: ‘Identifying and addressing shared challenges in conducting health and social care research for older people’, held between the 11^th-15^th of June in Botucatu, Brazil. The workshop was funded by the British Council and the Sao Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP) and organised by the University of Nottingham and UNESP.

Over the course of five days we worked together under the supervision of our Brazilian and UK mentors (Prof Alessandro Ferrari Jacinto, Prof Paulo Villas Boas, Prof Vanessa Citero, Dr Adam Gordon, Prof Tom Dening & Dr Jay Banerjee) to share ideas, learn from each other and work on developing new collaborative research projects.

To set the scene, Brazil is the largest country in South America with an estimated population of 16 million adults aged 65 and over. Sao Paulo State has a population of 41 million people and is the most economically and research active state in Brazil with 34% of the GDP. Amazing stat of the week was that for every four research papers published in Latin America, two will be authored in Sao Paulo State!

Living and Working as a geriatrician in Wales

Dr Anthony James is a Consultant Physician at Princess of Wales Hospital. 

Why train, work and live in Wales and why do Geriatric medicine here? It isn’t an easy decision to choose a specialty or move to a different part of the country. Wales is often thought of for its castles, song, rugby, dragons and heavy industry in the way of Coal and steel.

The national health services was established on the 5^th July 1948 by Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh man, and today the National Health Service is Wales’ largest Employer.  In recent years the NHS in Wales policy has deviated from England’s version guided by the Wales Assembly Government (WAG) based in Cardiff.

BGS Management and Leadership Weekend: ‘LITTLE SPARKS’ to ‘BIG BANGS’

Barry Evans has been a specialty registrar in geriatric and general internal medicine since 2014. He has an interest in innovative models of care and that improve the health and quality of life of older people and QI Projects which improve the working lives of doctors in training. Here he discusses the Trainees’ Leadership and Management Weekend. He tweets @barryjames86 

Having commenced training in geriatric medicine in 2014, I’m often surprised by the speed at which my training has gone. If the last couple of winters in the NHS are anything to go by, there is no shortage of experience in clinical work for trainees in geriatric or internal/acute medicine, and despite the recently promised ‘cash injection’ for the NHS, there is unlikely to be a shortage of clinical work soon!

This clinical work allows us to see the entirety of the older person’s care journey, as geriatricians work in the community, in A&E, in acute medicine, on wards (medical and surgical!), and in intermediate care/rehabilitation – to name just a few.

Asking the Big Questions in Dublin’s Fair City – Part 2

Mary Ni Lochlainn is an Academic Clinical Fellow in Geriatric Medicine. She works at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

In the world of Alzheimer’s research we heard from Professor Michael Rowan, who focused on amyloid and ageing. Sleep and mood disorders can pre-date dementia diagnoses, and we see circadian rhythm disturbances in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Is there a window of opportunity here for preventative interventions? Alzheimer’s is a disease of abnormal protein aggregation – both amyloid and tau. Protein clearance tends to happen at night. Can we draw connections here? Prof Rowan explained that a recent New England Journal of Medicine paper showed 30% of patients didn’t have any amyloid even though they had been diagnosed with AD and enrolled in a trial. So what does this mean? Do these patients have another dementia? It cannot be denied that a blood or cerebrospinal fluid test would be very helpful in this diagnostic process.

Asking the Big Questions in Dublin’s Fair City – Part 1

Mary Ni Lochlainn is an Academic Clinical Fellow in Geriatric Medicine. She works at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

This February marked the first, hopefully of many, Biogerontology for Clinicians International Conference, held at the state-of-the-art Mercer Institute of Successful Ageing (MISA) at St. James’ Hospital, Dublin. Hosted by the inimitable Professor Rose Anne Kenny, of Trinity College Dublin, and staff of The Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing (TILDA), the programme boasted twelve expert speakers across a day and a half, with the aim of putting recent advances in biology in context with the pathology of ageing. The idea was to bring together leaders in ageing from various backgrounds, to ‘generate meaningful collaborative, translational approaches with significant potential strategic value to service users.’ And it certainly achieved those aims.

Spring Speakers Series: Are rules of thumb the answer?

Nathan Davies is a Senior Research Fellow at University College London focusing on care for people with dementia towards the end of life and supporting family carers. In this post he talks about his upcoming talk at the BGS Spring Meeting in Nottingham on his work developing rules of thumb for providing care towards the end of life for someone with dementia.

Can rules of thumb help manage uncertainty and the challenges facing practitioners caring for someone with dementia at the end of life?

We know that caring for someone towards the end of life can be a rewarding and intimate experience with that individual and those close to them. However, unfortunately for practitioners it can also be emotionally tough and challenging. This is particularly the case when caring for someone with dementia towards the end of life.

A Taste of the BGS

Fran Kirkham is an F2 doctor at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, having graduated from the Cambridge Graduate Course in Medicine in 2016. She originally did an English degree at Cambridge University and worked in PR and Communications for 7 years. She hopes to pursue a career in Community Geriatrics.

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
~ The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

An FY2 taster week can have a multitude of meanings. For some, it offers a reprieve from their mundane day job, almost as desirable as annual leave. For others, it is an opportunity to try a specialty that piqued their interest as a student. Yet others use it for cynical CV-building, knowing exactly to what profession they aspire and ‘proving commitment’ by spending an extra week doing the job they plan to do for the next 40 years. This may gain marks on the flawlessly-designed points-based applications which determine our chances of working in a specialty that bears any resemblance to our future career hopes or a location which is vaguely practical. Of course, a week is not realistically enough to get a sense of any job, nor ‘prove’ commitment to anything. But, as with many things in the NHS, this is the system in which we operate, so we make the best of it.

Practical palliative care after stroke

Dr Ruth England is a Consultant in Palliative Medicine at Royal Derby Hospital. She tweets @DrRuthEngland. She will be speaking at the upcoming BGS event Living and Dying Well with Frailty on 6 March in London. Please note this event has now SOLD OUT.

Palliative care is an active, holistic approach to those facing life-threatening illness. Good palliative care allows us ‘to live as well as possible for as long as possible’; and includes support for those approaching the end of their life.

In the UK, someone suffers a stroke every 5 minutes. Although there has been a decline in stroke mortality, it remains a leading cause of death in those aged over 65.  There a high risk of dying immediately after an event, and 40% of those affected by stroke die within a year. Long term survivors are likely to be burdened with ongoing physical, psychological and social issues.

Detectives wanted! – Applying for Geriatric Training

Zosia Beckett is a CMT2 in the West Yorkshire Region and is serving as the Junior representative (FY2 & CMT) on the BGS Trainees Council.

I am currently an ST3 in Geriatrics training in West Yorkshire. Having recently gone through the ST3 recruitment process myself, I thought it would be useful to pass on some advice to those applying this year. So far my experience as a Geriatrics trainee has been really positive; I am enjoying learning more about the sub-specialities of Geriatrics and the challenges of complex medical cases during acute medical takes. I would definitely recommend Geriatrics as a career for those who love to problem solve!