Health and ageing

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.

I’ve been interested in what happens to elderly men and women with cancer for a while now. The answer to 'what happens?' boils down to ‘not enough’, ‘never on time’ and ‘not with any care’.

The Department of Health and the NHS have been battling with cancer care for many years. The Cancer Reform Strategy (CRS) was launched at the end of 2007 and follows on from the Cancer Plan, introduced in 2000 to improve cancer outcomes in the UK. The CRS identifies several groups at risk of experiencing inequality in provision of, and access to, cancer services such as older men and women, people from black and minority ethnic communities and socially and economically deprived populations.

Policy wonkery turns up in the most unexpected places. Today’s release of a report into the failings of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust has flushed out another example. With the BBC reporting that hospital patients were left "sobbing and humiliated" by uncaring staff, poor care caused unimaginable distress and suffering, and patients had been "dying needlessly" one wonders, and then some, what on earth the nurses were up to.

There are three things to keep in the back of your mind when reading this. They are a) over one third of new cancer diagnoses are in men and women who are aged 75 years and older b) over half of all cancer related deaths are in men and women who are aged 75 years and older and c) recent scandals involving death or neglect in the NHS have been almost exclusively concerned with failings in the care of older people.