Department of Facebook Cats

Frazer Anderson is a Consultant Community Geriatrician in East Hampshire. He is Honorary Secretary of the BGS.

Now that the vote on the name of our Society has been concluded – and regardless of the result this was the most successful exercise in participatory democracy the Society has ever carried out – I would like to suggest another way of looking at the issue.

In John Gladman’s excellent Marjory Warren Lecture at the Spring Meeting in Nottingham, he presented some challenging statistics on what older people actually want and – more importantly – don’t want. In a nutshell, older people don’t want to be old if it involves disability, dependence and suffering.

Ward rounds – are they safe and effective for patients and doctors?

Dr Tarun Solanki is a Consultant Physician and Geriatrician at Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust.

Geriatricians are, in many hospitals, now responsible for looking after more than 50% of medical in-patients and are frequently required to look after outliers on non-medical wards. A recent article in the BMJ suggests that doctors’ way of working would not be accepted by businesses making decisions with far less impact and suggests that the old concept of the ward round is broken and needs to change^[i].

Since we, as geriatricians are providing a substantial element of acute inpatient care, should we not be at the forefront of improving the ward round so that it is not only effective and safe for patients but also to ensure geriatricians do not suffer from undue work pressures and risk burn-out?

Can Geriatric Medicine be learnt through reading ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’?

Dr Amy Heskett is a Speciality Doctor working in a Community Geriatrics team within West Kent called the Home Treatment Service. This team works alongside paramedics, GPs and district nurses to prevent unnecessary hospital admissions for people with frailty, multiple comorbidities, caring responsibilities or as part of end of life care.  The home visits use bedside testing and a multi-disciplinary approach to provide management of many acute medical presentations in a home-setting.  The development of these holistic plans requires a creative approach and the experiences often generate tweets @mrsapea and blogs at communitydoctoramy.wordpress.com

I read Roald Dahl’s ‘George’s Marvelous Medicine’ to my children today and my son said, “You really love the Grandma in this don’t you Mum?”

It’s true!  It was one of my favourite books during my own childhood and I now spend a large amount of time perfecting the Grandma’s voice for my children and absorbing the story with them as they snuggle on the sofa.  There is personal meaning to some of the pictures too and so a picture of George stirring the giant saucepan is hung on our kitchen wall.  The text describes ‘A rich blue smoke, the colour of peacocks’, at which point we cheer because Peacock is our family name.

Who knows what the next 70 years will bring?

Liz Charalambous is a nurse and PhD student. She tweets at @lizcharalambou and is a regular guest blogger for the BGS.

This year heralds the 70th anniversary of the British Geriatrics Society. Founded in 1947, the society sought to alleviate suffering and improve standards in the care of older people.

It seems almost impossible to imagine the world back then: a clunky analogue era of post-war rationing, George VI, the dawn of comprehensive schools, and of course a Labour government planning the inception of our beloved NHS. The future social determinants of health were given a nod to by Beveridge’s post war ‘giants on the road to reconstruction’, namely poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, by the undertaking of a newly introduced welfare state. The grimness of post-war Britain held the promise of a brighter future for all, with government commitment to better access to social housing, employment, social security, education and health.

Happy 70th Birthday BGS!

Dr Eileen Burns has been a geriatrician in Leeds since 1992 and is President of the BGS. She is currently Clinical Lead for integration in Leeds and Chairman of the BGS Community Geriatrics Special Interest Group. She tweets @EileenBurns13

The year is the BGS’s 70^th birthday, so I’d like to mark it by wishing all our members a Very Very Happy Birthday.

Our specialty grew from the work of an indomitable woman (the eponymous Marjory Warren (of MW House fame) who identified the potential for improvement in older people living in hospital wards of a workhouse like nature. She found conditions amenable to treatment or rehabilitation, and demonstrated that a large number of the inpatients (who were expected to live and die in that hospital ward) could be discharged from hospital after suitable attention.

Why Geriatric Medicine?

Dr James Fisher is a final year Geriatric Medicine trainee working at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust; he tweets @drjimbofish. Here he describes an ongoing project that seeks to understand more about career choices and recruitment to Geriatric Medicine.

Geriatricians of tomorrow: We need you! As the number of people living with frailty grows, geriatricians are increasingly in demand. Already, in terms of consultant numbers, Geriatric Medicine is the biggest hospital medical specialty – but to meet the needs of the ageing population, further expansion in numbers will be needed.

Book review: Geriatric Medicine At a Glance

Dr Shane O’Hanlon is a consultant geriatrician in Reading, and edits the BGS Blog; he tweets at @drohanlon

It seems like ages since the last quality textbook in geriatrics came out, so it is great to see this new addition to the popular “At A Glance” series. I’m a huge fan of these books, with their concise 2 page summary-style chapters that are ideal for quick reference. As a medical student they were perfect for revising, once you had read the main textbook: I spent many happy nights by candlelight with Pharm At a Glance, for example!