It has been suggested today that hospital ward rounds are being neglected due to overworked NHS staff becoming more task-oriented than patient-oriented.
The Guardian and BBC report that the Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of Nursing are advising that staff need to become much more patient-friendly and make ward rounds a cornerstone of hospital care.
Meanwhile in the Telegraph, it has been claimed that increasing numbers of asthma sufferers, particularly children, are ending up in A&E, because their GPs aren’t giving them sufficient advice about how to use their inhalers.
Studies have shown that “at best” a third of the drug in a dose gets into a patient’s lungs and at worst, none does.
In other news the Daily Mail has reported that the obesity epidemic is responsible for 22,138 cancer cases each year. This puts obesity as the second biggest cause of cancer, after smoking.
Also described in the Telegraph, the study focused mainly on pancreatic cancer, the fifth most deadly cancer. Professor Jackson, professor of human nutrition at the University of Southampton and chairman of the CUP panel, said: ‘We have found that 15 per cent of new cases could be avoided every year by keeping body weight within the healthy range.’
