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.

The British Geriatrics Society welcomes £20 million investment to help tackle loneliness

The British Geriatrics Society welcomes yesterday’s joint statement by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport announcing that charities and community groups will get £20 million of new funding to help people experiencing social isolation and loneliness.

Healthcare professionals now recognise loneliness as a ‘public health epidemic’ with evidence to suggest it is as bad for health outcomes as smoking 15 cigarettes a day[i]. Older people are one of the groups most at risk. In the UK, over 1 million older adults admit they feel lonely often or all the time[ii], a number set to increase given the changing demography.

Beyond text and images: Tackling loneliness with technology

Dr Eiman Kanjo is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Eiman has written some of the earliest papers in the research area of mobile sensing and she currently carries out work in the areas of technologies and data science for health & Wellbeing, Smart cities, Environmental Monitoring and its impact of health, and wellbeing monitoring. She tweets @eimankanjo She will be speaking at the Loneliness in Older People and its Impact on Health event on 13 June at Wellcome Collection in London.

Loneliness is a sad and frustrating event in anyone’s life, however its impact is more damaging for older people. Many older adults have lost so much of their independence they are left with memories of the life they once knew. Things that were once so important to them are taken away, such as the ability to drive, go to church, read a book, or even connecting with their loved ones.

Among the ways to combat loneliness, technology is starting to play a major role in helping to bridge the gap of interactions that older adults need.

In general, older adults do not necessarily dislike one form of technology or another, however, they are sometimes distrustful about the need for technology or about their ability to utilise it.

The Lonely brain

Dr Samuel Barnes Ph.D is a Lecturer at Imperial College London in the Division of Brain Sciences and was recently awarded a UK Dementia Research Institute Fellowship. The goal of his research is to understand the role of neural circuit plasticity in aging and neurodegeneration. His group uses a combination of in vivo voltage and calcium imaging, bioelectronics and electrophysiology to investigate the neural plasticity factors that make the aged brain susceptible to neurodegeneration and ultimately dementia. You can read more about his work here.  He will be speaking at the Loneliness in Older People and its Impact on Health event on 13 June at Wellcome Collection in London.

Daydreaming can be one of life’s great pleasures. Losing yourself in a thought or spending time quietly reflecting on the day’s events is an important part of modern life. But what if solitary thought was the only option? For many older people periods of loneliness are all too frequent. Such periods of social isolation can involve little to no contact with people for prolonged periods of time. What do these prolonged stretches of loneliness do to the brain?

To answer this question, we must consider how the brain processes the sensory and social world. The substrate of thought is the electrical activity that flows between neurons in the brain. These tiny nerve cells are connected to each other forming complex circuits that store and process sensory experience.

Where and how would you want to spend your last 1000 days?

Premila Fade is a Geriatrician with an interest in medical ethics and end of life care. Here she discusses BGS’s Living and Dying Well with Frailty event which was held on 6 March in London. She tweets @premzf 

If you were an older person living with frailty where and how would you want to spend your last 1000 days?  It is often difficult to accurately predict prognosis for older adults living with frailty and they have different needs at the end of life to younger people.  Traditional models of specialist palliative care do not always meet these needs or those of the carers and family supporting them.

What makes frailty different from other conditions at the end of life is that there can be prolonged periods of relative stability and then a potentially mild illness/insult causes a significant or catastrophic deterioration. This acute deterioration often triggers the conventional response to crisis – 999, ambulance to ED, investigations and the commencement of invasive medical treatment.

The Wild Wild Southwest: BGS Regional Meeting, Bath

Alasdair Miller is a ST6 Specialist Registrar in Geriatric Medicine at Royal United Hospital, Bath.

In the warm spell between the two flurries of snow and ice which have buffeted the UK in recent weeks, Bath’s Kingswood School Sports Pavilion played host to the Southwest Regional Meeting of the BGS. The event attracted a wide variety of attendees from different walks of Geriatric Medicine across the southwest- a multidisciplinary crowd ranging from junior trainees to eminent seniors, and with strong representation from both community and hospital teams. The day’s remit: to share learning and innovation from across the patch, update ourselves on topical and important areas within Geriatric Medicine, and foster links, cooperation and friendship with colleagues.

Social Gerontology: How important is it for medical students?

Sebastian Zaidman, Labib Hussain, Jack Lilly D’Cruz and William Yee Seng Tai all graduated from King’s College London in Summer 2015. In this blog, they discuss their recent Age and Ageing article, co-authored with Professort Anthea Tinker of KCL’s Institute of Gerontology, on the importance of social gerontology.

During our pre-clinical teaching at medical school, the rapidly escalating rates of age-related pathologies, Alzheimer’s Disease in particular, were a regular feature in lectures and tutorials alike. However, it wasn’t until our first clinical placements that we realised that a biomedical perspective of ageing would not suffice: to fully understand older patients’ medical conditions and to discuss best management and care options would necessitate a holistic view beyond the realm of a biomedical paradigm.

It is for this reason that we decided to take a year out of our medical studies to enrol on the Intercalated BSc programme at King’s College London.