Improving Continence Care for Older People

Vikky Morris is Chair of the BGS Bladder and bowels Special Interest Group. She will be speaking at the upcoming event Improving Continence Care in Older People on 21 September in Manchester.

1 in 3 women and 1 in 7 men over the age of 65 experience urinary incontinence. It is a significant problem associated with falls, fractures, social isolation, depression, urinary tract infections and moisture lesions. Faecal incontinence affects up to 10% of the population, although its prevalence is much higher in older people, nursing home residents (up to 60%), patients with cognitive impairment and neurological conditions. Numbers are also likely to be an underestimate due to the stigma attached to incontinence. Both urinary and faecal incontinence are associated with great expense, both personal and to the NHS (more than 2% of the NHS budget). In addition, in older people, incontinence is second only to dementia as a reason for admission to a residential or nursing home.

Yoga-based exercise can improve well-being for older people

This blog was first published on the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Dissemination Centre Discover Portal. Read the corresponding Age and Ageing paper Yoga-based exercise improves health-related quality of life and mental well-being in older people: a systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

Yoga-based exercise offers a safe and accessible way to improve health-related quality of life and mental well-being for people over 60. Evidence for a moderate benefit of yoga in later life now extends beyond improved balance and flexibility.

Yoga includes stretches, poses, breathing routines and meditation. This review focused on the physical exercise/activity components. Most of the 12 included trials took place in Western countries and classes were all run by qualified yoga instructors as in the UK. Class attendance was high for eight weeks or more (50 to 96%). However, women outnumbered men by three to one, implying that yoga classes may need adapting to appeal to older men.

Yoga classes are widely available and could offer an accessible way to improve older people’s activity levels and well-being. The research was moderate to high quality, but it cannot yet show exactly how much yoga or which kind works best for particular groups of people. However, the good news is that these approaches seem effective.

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!

Are we really representing the BGS? Experiences from the Programme Board and a call for your contributions

Shelagh O’Riordan is a Consultant Community Geriatrician and Clinical Director for Frailty Services with Kent Community NHS Trust and tweets @jupiterhouse1 Asan Akpan is a consultant Geriatrician at Aintree University Hospital NHS FT and tweets @asanakpan

In September 2017, the BGS put a call out to its members for Geriatricians with an interest in care homes and Community Geriatrics to represent the BGS at the newly established Hospital to Home Programme Board, an NHS England oversight group and part of the Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) Transformation Delivery  Programme.

Shelagh had just come to the end of a role at the Royal College of Physicians and, after 14 years, swapped her hospital role for a community one. Asan moved to a different hospital over 4 years ago to do mostly community geriatric medicine and has contributed to developing the service described on page 26 of the joint report on integrated care for frail older people by the BGS and RCGP.

The Paper Boat

Patricia Cantley works as a consultant physician in the Midlothian Hospital at Home Team, offering an alternative to hospital admission for frail and older patients. She also works in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and in the Community Hospital in Midlothian. She tweets under her married name of Elliott as @Trisha_the_doc

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the word Frailty and its importance within Medicine for Older People. We see a lot of frail people and as geriatricians they are our core business both inside and outside the hospital.

Healthcare professionals have debated over the last few years how to define Frailty, and even how we might begin to measure it. It is no longer adequate simply to shrug and say “we know it when we see it”.

July 2018 issue of Age and Ageing journal is out now

The July 2018 issue of Age and Ageing, the journal of the British Geriatrics Society is out now.  A full table of contents is available here, with editorials, research papers, reviews, short reports, case reports book reviews and more.  

Hot topics in this issue include:

• Blood pressure targets in treatment of hypertension
• Falls prevention
• Probiotics and prevention of infection
• Improving healthcare outcomes in care homes
• Caregiver relationships and Parkinson’s disease

The Editor’s View article gives an overview of the issue with a summary of highlights. This article is free to read and can be viewed here.

How should healthcare services to care homes be configured – results from the Optimal Study

Adam Gordon is Clinical Associate Professor in Medicine of Older People at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @adamgordon1978 Claire Goodman is Professor of Health Care Research at the University of Hertfordshire.  She tweets @HDEMCOP Here they describe findings from the Optimal Study, funded by the National Institute of Health Research and delivered by a collaboration of researchers from the Universities of Hertfordshire, Nottingham, Surrey, City University London, University College London, Kings College London and Brunel University.

The UK care home sector, with 425,000 beds, is just over three times the size of the acute hospital sector.  It is home to some of the oldest and most vulnerable members of UK society.  The average resident is over 85, has multiple health conditions, cognitive impairment and physical dependency.  Providing care to such older adults is recognised to be complex and challenging.

Autumn Speakers Series: The boundary between health and social care

Adam Gordon is Clinical Associate Professor in Medicine of Older People at the University of Nottingham.  He is currently principal investigator for the Dunhill Medical Trust funded PEACH study which considers using quality improvement collaboratives to implement Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment in care homes.  His twitter handle is @adamgordon1978.  You can follow the PEACH study @PEACHstudy. He will be speaking at the upcoming BGS Autumn Meeting in London.

Care home residents in the UK receive their healthcare predominantly through the National Health Service. Their social care – primarily focussing on enablement to support activities of daily living and supporting participation in society – is provided by staff in their care home.

Or at least that’s how it looks on paper.  In reality, the boundary between health and social care is less well defined.  Providing care to the older people who live in care homes, many of whom have multiple conditions and are approaching the end of their life, requires frequent give and take between healthcare and care home staff.

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.