Health and ageing

I remain very interested in what happens to men and women aged over 75, with and at risk of cancer. I remain very interested in the considerable ambivalence of cancer charities towards what happens to men and women aged 75 and over with and at risk of cancer. 

Benefit? Sounds more like a risk…..

In July 1985 a working group under Sir Patrick Forrest was invited by Ken Clarke (yes him, the same Ken Clarke as our current Ken Clarke) to look at the evidence on breast screening and decide what to do about it. It made its report - Breast Cancer Screening - in November 1986. The Government accepted it in full for implementation in early 1987.

Hence our current breast screening programme.

This was originally attached to the previous post, but I've cut it adrift to form a new one. It seems at least semi coherent - which is good enough for me in my patch of blogosphere. There's no disguising it though - it's still a stream of unsought and, I imagine, unappreciated advice to cancer charities.

Let’s start with the overarching far too inFrequently Asked Question. How should the cancer charity sector develop its role in support, information and campaigning, on behalf of elderly men and women, in a disease of ageing, to both augment and challenge the current cancer policy agenda?

… this follows on from the previous post and should be read with an exasperated and another thing tone to your internal voice. To re-cap – the breast cancer lobby was advanced by Radio Four’s Women’s Hour as a great model for other health lobbies to copy….in particular, the prostate cancer one.

The Care Quality Commission has, once again, exposed the low standards of care inflicted on far too many elderly adults in the National Health Service. 20% of sites visited were failing to ensure dignity or nutrition for their patients, or both. One in five.

Here’s an interesting thing. I’m trying to find the origins of a story that was all over the news earlier this week. You may have caught it? The one about using MRI scans and some new computer software to improve diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

Yesterday's report from the Health Service Ombudsman about the inhuman care of elderly people in the NHS  generated  predictable handringing about the standard of nurse education in the UK. As in 'should be more of it'. Contrast that with a contrary view, also expressed, that nurses are now too well educated and think they are above contact with patients as that's too grubby, too menial.

If you use numbers to make an argument, as advocates in prostate cancer do, it helps sometimes to look for the men the numbers represent. Older men are missing.

Ah yes! The sound of doctors whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up.

It is meant to be reassuring but ‘you’ll die with it, not of it’ must rank as one of the least useful phrases known to medical science. It is true, epidemiologically speaking, in medical science - but it is not useful in patient care. It’s the least useful phrase known in patient care.

It's trotted out to men diagnosed with prostate cancer.