Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternative wrote the French actor and singer, Maurice Chevalier. In the UK this week, the government announced a forthcoming White paper on social care will be published in June detailing a new system for looking after the elderly in care homes and through improved home help services ensuring that pensioners are no longer forced to sell their homes to cover the cost of care in old age. Last year the Dilnot Commission reported on this subject recommending capping individuals’ lifetime contributions to their social care costs at £35,000, as well as increasing the means tested threshold above which people must fund the full cost of their care from £23,250 to £100,000. However, the costs of food and accommodation in a care home would not be covered. more…

“We’re doomed” was the familiar catch phrase of Private Fraser—the dour, Scottish ex-undertaker turned home guardsman from the popular BBC television series Dad’s Army. According to his Wikipedia page, Fraser was also president of his local Caledonian Society but was the only member.

I was reminded of Private Fraser during my daily ritual of perusing the overnight musings of various pharmaceutical and medical device companies on the social media site Twitter. One giant Pharmaceutical company manufacturing cancer drugs tweeted the other day “One-third of estrogen receptor positive #breastcancer patients see their cancer return,” which is probably not the message that anyone just receiving the diagnosis would want to hear. Women with a recent diagnosis of breast cancer have to make difficult enough decisions about the pros and cons of embarking on unpleasant and mutilating therapies without being told that they have a one in three chance of disease recurrence. Presumably due to the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter, the author of the aforementioned tweet was unable to add the additional comment “unless you take our drug.” Astonishingly this is an identical Twitter faux pas to the one committed by a rival company back in the autumn of 2011. more…

“I’m afraid I’m currently out of the office right now on the never-ending mission to restore world health—I am very interested in your message and will endeavour to reply to it as soon as I am back.” This rather immodest response to my request to sign up to a new soon-to-be launched on-line game (http://www.syrum-game.com) was signed by the lead character, Professor Syrum. Syrum will be a social game on Facebook which will allow participants to take control of their own pharmaceutical company. The aim is to equip and use a laboratory to discover new drugs, bringing them to market to improve global health, or as the learned professor puts it—“the health of the world is at stake and you are the only one that can save us.”

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Almost every home in the country has one and unlike the background population they have tended to become slimmer and slimmer over recent years. The television set has managed to hold onto its place as the epicentre of home entertainment, despite the assault from the personal computer and the ubiquitous iPod, iPhone, and iPads. One of the endearing attractions of television is the high quality picture resolution and the performance of the device without the need for multiple usernames and passwords, or without being affected by the variable performance of the local broadband network. In contrast to the choice available on the internet, the acceptance of the rigid nature of programme scheduling on television remains somewhat surprising, but endearing as a template around which the week’s other activities are planned. more…

January is the month that heralds the end of procrastination. The New Year is traditionally the time that individuals and organisations look ahead and plan for the future. Among the usual resolutions to do more, eat less, and be more productive, there is also the ubiquitous past-time of predicting the near future. For healthcare the future seems to be focused increasingly on the development and application of technology with a blurring of the distinction between consumer electronics and medical devices.

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Bad news makes good press. Last week the main medical news item was the release of the National Diabetes Audit figures for England and it made grim reading. The audit collected data from 152 Primary Care Trusts covering almost 70% of the population of people living with diabetes. The bottom line was that there are an estimated 24,000 excess (i.e. premature) deaths each year associated with diabetes and many of these are preventable. The news was especially bad for people with type 1 diabetes where the excess risk of an early death was increased 2.6 fold compared to the background population and was even higher for young people with the condition. These mortality data follow on from the more general findings highlighting the fact that achieved levels of blood glucose control have not improved for a number of years and are particularly bad for the lost tribe of young people aged 16-24 years with type 1 diabetes. more…

Social media seems to be the modern equivalent of the stocks. The main objective of the stocks was public humiliation. Nowadays, any member of the public can use social media to highlight grievances they might have against companies, organisations, and institutions and post them for all to see and comment on. more…

There are now two groups of people living with chronic disease, those that are connected and those who are not. In days gone by, “being connected” meant having personal and professional contacts in all of the right places to further an idea, career, or relationship. Being connected nowadays, however, means something completely different – owning and using a “smart” mobile telephone or any electronic gadget. For those who are connected there is a mindboggling array of applications (apps) that can be used to take self-management of a chronic disease to the next level. In addition, payers of healthcare are now demanding decentralised methods for delivering patient care compared to the existing expensive traditional models. more…

Medicine is an art more than a science and the canvas is communication. This week the UK supermarket giant Asda announced that it would no longer stock landline telephones as they are becoming as obsolete as white coats and necks ties for hospital doctors. According to one Asda mobile buyer “standing in one place to make a call just doesn’t make sense anymore, nor does untangling the wire, so we’ve decided to hang up sales of landline phones.” Asda have predicted that the growth of mobile smart phones and the burgeoning app industry is now the preferred modern way of communication. Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook also predicted the demise of email describing this form of communication as being “too slow and formal” at the launch of his social network’s new messaging service. more…

Loose lips sink ships was coined as a slogan during WWII as part of the US Office of War Information’s attempt to limit the possibility of people inadvertently giving useful information to enemy spies. Unguarded comments by healthcare professionals hit the headlines in recent weeks after medics were reprimanded for using derogatory terms about hospital departments and other healthcare professionals on twitter. In one sense this was a déjà vu as many older clinicians might remember the impact of the satirical novel The House of God by Samuel Shem and its negative description of patients in hospital. Although hugely controversial, The House of God was compulsory reading for any new doctor on “the firm” at the time. more…