Abergavenny Museum

Review of this book on theology and film for Modern Believing.

Major changes are being planned for the NHS in Wales over the next five years. Services have to be safe, sustainable, effective, and fair, the Welsh Assembly Health minister, Lesley Griffiths, said in her first major speech. “Bringing about these changes will not be easy,” she said. “They will not be easy for the dedicated staff that work in the NHS. The changes, in some instances, won’t be easy for some patients to accept either. Change is necessary and in some cases long overdue.” Ms Griffiths, who has also set out plans to improve maternity care in Wales, outlined her vision for the NHS at the …

Most general practitioners have had no training in sick note certification, and some doctors want the responsibility for issuing sick notes to be removed from GPs altogether, finds a survey of almost 1000 GPs in the United Kingdom. The findings are based on 878 (42%) completed questionnaires out of 2154 sent to a random sample of GPs between June and August 2008 in a bid to provide hard data on the sick note certification practices of GPs and their views on how the process might be changed ( Fam Pract 2009; doi:10.1093/fampra/cmp096). The mean number of weekly sick notes …

The killing of a vicar by a man with mental health problems could not have been predicted, but the chance of it happening might have been less had he received appropriate treatment after an earlier incident. Had Geraint Evans undergone a full psychiatric assessment after an earlier incident of self harm, a diagnosis of psychosis could have been made and appropriate treatment begun, concludes a review of the case by Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, which makes a number of recommendations. When Mr Evans originally attended hospital there was a 40 minute wait to see the psychiatric team and he left without being seen. No attempt …

Lack of time and “survey fatigue” are partly to blame for a failure of GPs and other primary care doctors to take part in a study of leg ulcer care in Germany, say the study researchers, who achieved a recruitment rate of only 2% of practices contacted. The researchers have now published the reasons why so many doctors did not want their patients to take part in the randomised controlled trial of an interdisciplinary intervention to enhance leg ulcer patients’ self care ( BMC …

The National Patient Safety Agency has urged hospitals to look at how long it takes on-call staff to respond to emergencies, and how far away they live from their main place of work. The agency has also asked whether there have been any serious near miss incidents out of hours owing to delays to emergency surgery or diagnostic procedures. The requests were prompted by an agency advisory note, or “signal,” which was triggered by a coroner’s letter reviewed by the agency’s National Reporting and Learning Service. The review identified …

The pharmaceutical giant Roche has breached the British drug industry’s code of conduct with a scheme that provided shopping vouchers to young patients as an incentive to use one of the company’s products. The scheme was described as “unacceptable” by the code of conduct panel of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, which found that Roche breached the code of practice in an adherence and incentive scheme for its cystic fibrosis drug dornase alfa (marketed as Pulmozyme). “The panel was very concerned about a pharmaceutical company in effect providing cash as an incentive to patients to use its medicine,” says a report on the …

One hundred million people in China will be killed by tobacco in the first half of this century if current smoking trends continue, a report says ( CVD Prevention and Control 2009 Jan 20, doi:10.1016/j.cvdpc.2008.12.001). One third of all young Chinese men will eventually die of tobacco related diseases, and the annual number of tobacco deaths will rise to three million by the middle of the century. “The only hope of substantially limiting tobacco deaths in China in the first half of this century is …

More than 30 000 patients with cancer a year in England may not be getting appropriate radiotherapy. The authors of an audit based study of all NHS radiotherapy centres say that provision falls short in three key areas—waiting times for treatment, access to treatment, and the dose fractionation prescribed ( Clinical Oncology 2009 Aug 3, doi:10.1016/j.clon.2009.07.003). “There is a substantial current shortfall to be addressed immediately to meet waiting time targets and to improve timely access to treatment and thus the outcomes of therapy,” say the authors, from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and the Royal College of Radiologists. The paper focuses on the gap between radiotherapy activity in 2007 and demand, as modelled by the National Radiotherapy Advisory Group (NRAG). The authors collected data on all NHS patients in England who were starting a course of radiotherapy in …