10 days in a hospital bed leads to 10 years’ worth of lost muscle mass in people over age 80

Dan Thomas is an ST6 working in Liverpool. He is the BGS Clinical Quality Group Trainee Rep and the Deputy Media Editor. He tweets @dan26wales

‘10 days in a hospital bed leads to 10 years’ worth of lost muscle mass in people over age 80’

I have lost count of the number of times I have quoted this fact, I use it when teaching on frailty, and I have used it when assessing people in the emergency department to explain the risks of hospital induced deconditioning. I regularly hear other Geriatricians use this fact. It is emblazoned across much of the #EndPJParalysis material, and is quoted (unreferenced) on the NHS improvement website.

The British Geriatrics Society calls for all healthcare professionals to learn from the Gosport Inquiry to help prevent future tragedies

The British Geriatrics Society is calling all healthcare professionals to review the Gosport Independent Panel Report, and to learn from these shocking events which led to the deaths of over 450 patients who were given opiate painkillers “without medical justification” from 1989 to 2000 at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire.

The Inquiry found there was a “disregard for human life” and an “institutionalised practice of shortening lives” at the hospital. In response to the Inquiry’s findings the Society is also calling for increased knowledge of best practice and clinical guidelines, especially in relation to prescribing and pain management in older people. The Society fully supports the families’ ongoing quest for truth and accountability.

The right intervention, at the right time, in the right place…

Stephanie Robinson is an occupational therapist at Harrogate hospital working as the  frailty team leader across the medical elderly wards and previously seconded into the Supported Discharge Service. She has had a key role in cross boundary working, outreaching from frail elderly inpatient based wards to the community.

The right intervention, at the right time, in the right place… How Harrogate District Foundation Trust therapists from the community and in-patient wards are tackling the national bed crisis: piloting a Supported Discharge Service.

The pressure is on in Harrogate – the population of over 60s is 26.5% compared to 22.4% nationally.  By 2030 the district’s over 65 population is predicted to increase by 15,000 people.  One of the Trust’s strategic aims for the next five years is to integrate acute, community and social care to allow patients to be treated closer to home, or at home and reduce reliance on acute beds.  It is understood that therapy assessments completed in a patient’s own home are a more accurate reflection of their capabilities than those completed in the hospital environment.  Based on the Discharge to Assess model, the concept that the hospital is often not the most appropriate place for patients of any age to remain is not a new one.

Identifying older patients with frailty from routinely collected hospital data

Dr Thomas Gilbert is a consultant geriatrician (Hospices Civils de Lyon, FRANCE), with interests in Health Services Research. He worked with Dr Jenny Neuburger and colleagues from the Nuffield Trust in London on the development of the Hospital Frailty Risk Score whilst he was a clinical research fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Simon Conroy in Leicester (Department of Health Sciences).  He will be speaking at the Urgent care for frail older people event on 25 May at Horizon in Leeds. 

Advances in health care have helped people in developed countries live longer than ever before. This is good news for all of us, but it also presents a challenge to our health systems and a need to rethink the way that we provide healthcare. Out of nearly 20 million people admitted to an NHS hospital in the UK in 2015, a quarter were aged 75 years or older, and this proportion is set to increase.

For some older people, hospitalisation is associated with increased harms over and above their presenting clinical condition. Recognising that age alone is insufficient to identify and respond to such vulnerability, the term ‘frailty’ is increasingly being employed to highlight patients exposed to an increased risk of poor outcomes and likely to require higher resource use.

‘We don’t need no education…’ Teaching about delirium in medical schools

Dr Claire Copeland is a Consultant Physician in Care of the Elderly and Stroke Medicine at Forth Valley Royal Hospital. Her paper Development of an international undergraduate curriculum for delirium using a modified Delphi process has recently been published in Age and Ageing. She tweets at @Sparklystar55

Back in 2015 a workshop at the European Delirium Association (EDA) conference was held to bring together a group of delirium experts. Its purpose? To develop a consensus agreement on a delirium curriculum for medical undergraduates.

Most of you reading this I’m sure will be familiar with delirium. It’s technically been around for centuries. However there are many working in healthcare who still do not know about it. Or if they do, they refer to it by every other name except delirium.

How can hospitals empower older people with advanced disease?

Dr Lucy Selman is Cicely Saunders International Faculty Scholar in the Department of Palliative Care, Policy, and Rehabilitation at King’s College London, and a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. In this blog Lucy discusses her recent Age and Ageing paper on an international study of patient empowerment in hospitals in London, Dublin and San Francisco (part of BuildCARE, a project led by Prof. Irene J. Higginson at King’s College London).

Empowered patients adopt healthier behaviours, use health services more cost-effectively, and experience better quality of life than patients who feel they are passive recipients of healthcare. Across the developed world, policy-makers are waking up to the benefits for patients and health services when people are encouraged to engage with clinicians, make decisions and manage their illness in a way that reflects their own values.

A specialist medical and mental health unit

Dr Rowan Harwood is‎ a consultant physician, professor of geriatric medicine at Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust

Click here to go to video

There is a lot of criticism of how we manage cognitively impaired patients in acute hospitals. And advice on how to do it better. The hope has been that more expert and co-ordinated services would improve outcomes and save resources. But there has been little in the way of rigorous evaluation.

We developed a specialist medical and mental health unit with the ambitious objective of demonstrating best practice. We enhanced the ward environment, ward staffing and skill mix, including mental health specialist nurses, therapists and psychiatry, trained all staff to a high level in the person centred philosophy of care, and endeavoured to engage family carers more fully.

After 18 months of operation we ran a randomised controlled trial, published in the BMJ. This video abstract describes the intervention and trial results.To illustrate the challenges and capture the essence of compassionate person-centred care, we made a 23 minute documentary, called Today is Monday. Footage from this is used to illustrate the abstract.

The full 23-minute film is available for training purposes; interested readers are welcome to discuss this with me Rowan.Harwood@nuh.nhs.uk.