Theresa May pledges mental health revolution will reduce detentions

Theresa May will pledge to scrap the “flawed” Mental Health Act, warning that it has allowed the unnecessary detention of thousands of people and failed to deal with discrimination against ethnic minority patients.

In an attempt to meet her pledge to prioritise mental illness during her premiership, she will commit to ripping up the 30-year-old legislation and replace it with new laws designed to halt a steep rise in the number of people being detained. Increased thresholds for detention would be drawn up in a new mental health treatment bill to be unveiled soon after a Conservative victory. Mental health charities, clinicians and patients would be consulted on the new legislation.

While the announcement is likely to be welcomed by mental health campaigners, there will be warnings that a lack of resources, rather than badly drafted laws, has been the real driver of the increase in detention.

The overhaul is being described by the Conservatives as the biggest change to the law on mental health treatment in more than three decades.

“On my first day in Downing Street last July, I described shortfalls in mental health services as one of the burning injustices in our country,” May said. “It is abundantly clear to me that the discriminatory use of a law passed more than three decades ago is a key part of the reason for this.

“So today I am pledging to rip up the 1983 act and introduce in its place a new law which finally confronts the discrimination and unnecessary detention that takes place too often. We are going to roll out mental health support to every school in the country, ensure that mental health is taken far more seriously in the workplace, and raise standards of care.”

More than 63,000 people were detained under the Mental Health Act in 2014-15, an increase of 43% compared with 2005-06. Black people are also disproportionately affected – with a detention rate of 56.9 per 100 patients who spent time in hospital for mental illness. It compares with a rate of 37.5 per 100 among white patients.

In its last report on the act, the Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of healthcare services, said it had “failings that may disempower patients, prevent people from exercising legal rights, and ultimately impede recovery or even amount to unlawful and unethical practice”.

The new legislation would include a code of practice aimed at reducing the disproportionate use of mental health detention for minority groups and countering “unconscious bias”. Safeguards would be introduced to end rules that mean those who are detained can be treated against their will. Those with the capacity to give or refuse consent would be able to do so.

The new bill would form part of a series of measures designed to improve mental health in schools and the workplace. However, ministers would face immediate questions over whether they were providing sufficient funding for their plans.

The Tories would commit to hiring 10,000 staff in the NHS by 2020. An insider said the plan would be funded from existing budgets, because mental health service funding will be up by £1.4bn in real terms by 2020.

The Equalities Act would also be altered to prevent workplace discrimination. Currently patients who have conditions such as depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder are only protected from discrimination if their condition is continuous for 12 months. That would be altered to take account of the fact that the conditions are often intermittent.

Every primary and secondary school in England and Wales would have staff trained in mental health first aid and be given a single point of contact with local mental health services. Children would be taught more about mental health, including keeping safe online and cyber-bullying.

Large companies would be required to train mental health first responders alongside traditional first aiders.

Theresa May pledges mental health revolution will reduce detentions

How we can start a social care revolution in seven easy steps | Katie Johnson

The government’s commitment to provide an additional £2bn for social care in the spring budget was presented as a solution to help ease pressure on the NHS and councils over the next three years. While the measure has addressed the immediate funding crisis, there is concern that this is no more than a short-term fix. The announcement risks masking the true scale of the challenges ahead and the radical surgery required to reform social care.

In all likelihood, the extra money will be used by local authority and NHS commissioners to block purchase places in residential care homes. This is not the answer.

Spending money in this way will do little to tackle the fundamental problem: we are admitting too many older people to hospital, keeping them there for too long and failing to give them the care they need in their own homes.

While cheaper than a hospital bed, a place in a residential care home is still more expensive and, crucially, less effective than care and support in the community.

There needs to be a transformation in the way that social care is commissioned and provided, to improve the quality of care, but also to make services financially sustainable, without the need to raid other budgets for extra funding.

A strategy for reform would have seven key elements:

1. Champion independent living

We need to engineer a dramatic shift away from residential care towards the kind of support elderly people actually want and need. That means better support for people to live independently in their own homes, with a skilled, professional workforce to provide the advice and assistance they need. We need to invest in a model of care that involves greater collaboration between the person being supported and those providing support.

2. Support families and carers

There needs to be stronger provision of advice and assistance for families and other carers, and more effective liaison with voluntary and community organisations that are skilled in providing support to older people. This means creating partnerships that can empower volunteers and deliver more professionalised community care.

3. Shift the funding focus to community-based care

Local authorities need to switch their focus away from expensive residential provision to support family, carer and community-based services. This funding shift is necessary if we are to create a fundamentally new system that offers holistic care in the home and keeps older people, wherever possible, out of hospital and residential care.

4. Incentivise local authorities

Local authorities should be incentivised to purchase individually tailored packages of care. Why are we so afraid of asking people, and their relatives and carers, what they really want and need? Many councils want to do this, but their options are limited by what the market can provide or by a lack of imagination. They should be rewarded when they invest in transforming the way providers think about services.

5. Prevention rather than cure

Transforming the social care system, rather than simply shoring it up, would address the problem of delayed discharges from hospital, but also reduce the flow of older people into hospital in the first place. It would prioritise prevention, rather than waiting for problems to arise and then attempting an inadequate cure. The best local authorities are already using their resources creatively, such as looking at predictive analytics to anticipate demand.

6. A better alternative to ‘integration’

There is plenty of talk about the need for an integrated health and social care system, or even a “National Care Service”. There is a much simpler solution. NHS providers and local government need to co-operate better to find the right kind of care for elderly people.

Liaison between hospitals and local authorities will never be truly effective if it is just one more item on the to-do list of hard-pressed nurses and social care workers. It requires dedicated resources – well qualified people whose full-time job it is to ensure that the hand-offs between hospital and community care are speedy, efficient and driven by the individual needs of the patient. Creating these vital liaison roles should be only the first step in a programme to transform the skills and role of the social care workforce.

7. Pool resources

Just as the NHS and local authorities should look to share resources, there is a key role to be played by combined authorities and other city and county partnerships. They should be encouraged to pool their money to fund the transformation of social care.

The budget has already seen one U-turn. It is not too late to redirect the £2bn and make a real difference to health and social care in the UK.

Katie Johnston is director at KPMG

Join the Social Care Network to read more pieces like this. Follow us on Twitter (@GdnSocialCare) and like us on Facebook to keep up with the latest social care news and views.

How we can start a social care revolution in seven easy steps | Katie Johnson

Jeremy Hunt"s hospital food revolution has failed, campaigners say

Jeremy Hunt has been accused of failing to deliver his promised revolution in hospital food after the health secretary’s own department found that many hospitals have still not improved patient catering.

A Department of Health study shows that almost half of hospitals in England have failed to implement key improvements almost two and a half years after Hunt’s crackdown.

The disclosure led food campaigners to claim that supposedly legally binding duties put on hospitals in 2014 to serve healthier food and check if patients were malnourished had come to nothing.

At the time Hunt claimed his new hospital food standards would force NHS trusts to offer patients fresh fruit around the clock and cut the amount of salt in meals or risk being fined or losing contracts to deliver vital care.

“These figures from the government’s own research show the widespread failure in England to drive up food standards in hospitals. We can see from the report that almost half of all hospitals are not meeting the government’s own standards on hospital food,” said Katherine Button of the Campaign for Better Hospital Food.

The DH research, titled “Compliance with hospital food standards in the NHS. Two years on: a review of progress since the Hospital Food Standards Panel report in 2014”, found widespread breaches of what were meant to be mandatory standards that all should meet.

• 48% of hospitals are still not meeting government buying standards that oblige them to meet a range of standards regulating the quality, nutritional value and ethical sourcing of the food they serve patients, staff and visitors.

• While over half of all hospitals had by last year begun assessing the nutritional needs of every patient in order to detect and avoid malnutrition, an unspecified substantial minority still had not.

• Only 55% of hospitals have fully complied with the British Dietetic Association’s nutrition and hydration digest, a toolkit designed to help hospitals ensure patients receive nutritious meals that meet their dietary requirements.

Katharine Jenner, the campaign director of Consensus Action on Salt, Sugar and Health, said: “This is more evidence that voluntary measures don’t work, even when they are dressed up as ‘legally binding’ in NHS standard contracts for hospitals. We need mandatory standards, with rigorous monitoring, reporting and meaningful sanctions for non-compliance.”

Button said she feared that hospitals’ push to overhaul their food may have been hampered by NHS-wide cost-cutting. “It seems that this well-intentioned drive to increase standards has fallen victim to budget cuts in catering departments and kitchens across the country.”

The DH insisted that its research painted a much more positive picture of progress made since Hunt unveiled the new standards to widespread acclaim in August 2014. It also shows, for example, that 96% of hospitals are either already compliant with the 10 key characteristics of good nutritional care or working towards that goal.

A spokeswoman said: “Every patient deserves nutritious food when they are in hospital which is why we introduced the first ever legally binding food standards in the history of the NHS. We can now see that over 90% of hospitals are compliant or actively working towards compliance with food standards and food is rated good in nine out of 10 hospitals.”

Jeremy Hunt"s hospital food revolution has failed, campaigners say

The Guardian view on AI in the NHS: not the revolution you are looking for | Editorial

The news that two healthcare trusts in London are to experiment with a system to look up symptoms by text message, to triage the kind of non-urgent queries at present handled by the NHS 111 service, raises many questions. They may not seem urgent when people are dying in the corridors of an NHS hospital for want of money, but in the long term they are just as important. Some are purely medical: is this an area that requires the attention of a human being, or is it one where purely factual answers will suffice? When will this project start using artificial intelligence? Some have to do with the way that the NHS is being privatised around the edges in ways that disadvantage the central public parts of it. Widest of all is the general question of the automation of brainwork, which might have effects quite as gigantic as the replacement of manual labour by technology has had.

Two kinds of claims are made for AI in medicine. The weaker and more plausible is that it can automate the processes where no judgment is required, only the clear and consistent following of well-understood rules. This kind of thing is what the 111 service is supposed to do: the question that it answers is not “what’s wrong with you?” but “do you really need to see a doctor?” Some triage is necessary in any healthcare system, and the present system in the NHS is under huge and growing strain.

But the wider claim of healthcare automation is that there will be systems that can augment and eventually replace the judgment of trained human beings. The hope is that deep analysis of unimaginable quantities of data will yield reliable knowledge superior to anything that unaided humans can produce. The placebo effect is important in medicine, and people who believe they are being treated by doctors who have the help of almost omniscient computers will probably do better than those who feel they are getting the harassed attention of an overworked GP even when the diagnosis and the remedies prescribed are exactly the same, as in most cases they will be. But that is not the basis on which we are promised a revolution in the delivery of healthcare. The revolution may come anyway: we are living through an enormous expansion in the reach and variety of machine learning systems, but it will not be for some time. The great majority of diseases do not require heroic diagnosis and exceptional treatment so much as the humane application of well-understood treatments. Much of what’s wrong with the NHS is a lack of money rather than sophistication. Even urgent large-scale threats such as the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens don’t need artificial intelligence to avert, only the consistent use of the intelligence we already have.

It is the apparently small-scale automation of clerical work that we need to think about, because that might happen as quickly as the spread of smartphones did. Vast areas of bureaucracy are about the reduction of complex problems to simple ones for which the correct answers can be written down in a flow chart. This is artificial stupidity rather than artificial intelligence, but the two can merge inside computer systems to produce huge social change. Once the work has been broken down into simple algorithms, these can much more easily and quickly be followed by machines. The 111 service in north London is only one example of a much wider phenomenon. A Japanese insurance company has just replaced 35 claims processors with IBM’s Watson expert system. The Japanese government is preparing to automate the responses to parliamentary questions in a similar way. These are the first signs of a process that may annihilate millions of white-collar jobs in the same way that blue-collar jobs have already disappeared across the developed world. That would be a development to make last year’s political upheavals look like the mere premonitory tremblings of a real earthquake to come.

The Guardian view on AI in the NHS: not the revolution you are looking for | Editorial

Can a digital revolution save the NHS?

As the NHS sinks ever deeper into financial crisis, and the search for efficiencies intensifies, it is unsurprising that the idea of harnessing the digital revolution to the way healthcare is delivered is gathering policy steam. Notwithstanding the spectacular top-down failure of the NHS National Programme for IT and the disappointing results of the national Whole System Demonstrator programme, it is entirely reasonable to revisit the ways in which advances in technology might offer smart solutions.

Currently the policy landscape is littered with strategies, reports and evolving structures. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, says the NHS must “go paperless” – by 2020 according to the Five Year Forward View; a national information board has been set up to deliver on this commitment; the air is thick with centrally-driven frameworks like the digital maturity index and local digital roadmaps; and a new digital delivery board has been set up by NHS England. Meanwhile, the influential Wachter Review along with weighty reports from the Nuffield Trust and the King’s Fund are all ratcheting up the pressure for change.

Research suggests that technology can indeed improve the quality of life of older people and their carers as well as support improvements in the safety and quality of care. Products are being developed at an astonishing rate, from low-level gadgets through to traditional telecare/telehealth and on to emerging digital technology including mobile phones, apps and televideo consultations. The key debate now is not so much about what can be done, but about how to put it into practice.

Four key issues need to be addressed.

Funding

There is thought to be about £1.3bn earmarked for the “paperless NHS” but little clarity over when it will be made available and whether it will be ringfenced. The size of the pot is also small for the shift from analogue to digital – Bob Wachter estimated a cost of £4.2bn for the secondary care sector alone. There is also the issue of allocation, with funding priority to be given to advanced organisations whose successes will, it is hoped, trickle down to the less advanced. Arguably the jam needs to be spread more thinly.

Stakeholder engagement

There are two main groups whose engagement needs to be secured – frontline staff and end users. Frontline staff are too often seen as passive recipients of new technology and are not involved in the development of a system’s architecture or user interfaces. Failure to convince them of the virtue of change can lead to all manner of resistance strategies arising from inadequate understanding, lack of time, challenges to established routines and fears around job security.

Users also have to be convinced of the value of using new devices. Technology varies in the ways in which it requires engagement and action on the part of users. At one end of the spectrum, a telecare system based upon monitoring and surveillance may require little more than consent to installation of the equipment; at the other it needs active self-monitoring, self-management and engagement with the technology and with professionals. Where an active role for users is envisaged, issues of digital literacy and resistance come to the fore, and localities will need robust strategies to maximise technological familiarity.

Systems not silos

Even now the focus of technological development tends to be silo-based – GPs have long since invested in their own systems; Wachter only looked at the acute sector; non-acute trusts and social care are still out on a limb. Any solution for the incompatibility between IT systems used by all the different parts of the NHS is generally only focused on communication between hospitals or, at best, between hospitals and GPs. The reality for growing numbers of patients is that their “journey” traverses all of these sectors and more. Currently, wherever patients present there is little or no information on where they have been before or about where they might end up subsequently. A more ambitious, system-wide approach is needed.

Patience

The danger with all this digital razzmatazz is that too much is expected too quickly. Politicians and managers may expect a quick and unrealistic return on investment, along with unattainable demands for hard evidence of impact. If no such requirements can be met, then hard-pressed decision makers may well be reluctant to take a short-term risk for a potential longer-term gain. It is up to NHS England to construct a more realistic timeline for investment and change.

Wachter’s main conclusion is that using technology entails both technical and adaptive change – while the technology is knowable, what is less well understood is the requirement for people themselves to change. It is, in short, about culture and whole system change. The potential role for technology is not one of serving as an optional extra to normal business but rather a new paradigm to structure the way healthcare is conceived. This will require much more investment and support than is currently on offer.

Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views.

Can a digital revolution save the NHS?

The Guy Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Well being Care by John Foot – overview

Franco Basaglia is nevertheless a household identify in Italy. His name is always connected to Law 180 (“Basaglia’s law”), promulgated in 1978. It was a rushed compromise of legislation that properly ended the era of detention and repression for the mentally unwell. Basaglia knew it was imperfect, warning that “we ought to keep away from a sense of euphoria”, but it was the culmination of a career on the health-related barricades. In the phrases of the Italian philosopher, Norberto Bobbio, it was “the only genuine reform” in Italian historical past. Basaglia died just two many years later on, aged only 56.

Born into a relaxed family in Venice in 1924, Basaglia (who occurs to be my wife’s fantastic-uncle), was an instinctive anti-fascist, covering the blackboards of his university in 1944 with the slogan: “Death to the Fascists, Freedom for the People”. Then a medical pupil, he was arrested and invested 6 months in prison. He grew to become element of a popular uprising in April 1945 when he and fellow prisoners broke out and led an insurrection across the city. His encounter in prison was formative: when he grew to become director of a psychological asylum in Gorizia, near the Yugoslavian border in the early 60s, he said: “It took me straight back to the war and the prison.” Primo Levi, as well, was a large influence, as Basaglia would regularly draw comparisons in between concentration camps and the asylum technique. He felt that psychiatrists had been closer to repressive prison guards than humane medics, and became fascinated by the so-referred to as “anti-pyschiatrists” in Britain: RD Laing, Maxwell Jones and David Cooper. In experimental settings like the “Rumpus Room”, Villa 21, Dingleton and Kingsley Hall, they had been trying not to demonise and medicalise psychological sickness, but to understand its existential and social aspects, and to permit sufferers the dangerous freedom to investigate, rather than repress, their crises. They wished, in Cooper’s words, to realize no matter whether invalids were really unwell, or had basically been invalidated.

On his 1st day in charge in Gorizia, Basaglia refused to indicator the permits for the restraint of prisoners, and from then on his aim was to introduce democracy inside of the asylum. At one point there were more than 50 meetings a week. Physicians didn’t put on white coats and mingled freely with individuals. A magazine was produced. Visits and outings had been encouraged. Locked wards have been opened, bars, shackles and strait-jackets eliminated.

Basaglia gathered close to himself an “équipe” of like-minded pioneers. The atmosphere Foot describes is one of outstanding energy and enthusiasm, with virtually no time left for loved ones or even sleep. Physicians were anticipated to be ever-existing and offered. The group was faced, inevitably, with opposition from the previous guard of asylum workers and, specifically, by traditionalist elements outside. But time was on Basaglia’s side: the anti-institutionalism of 1968 coincided with the publication of L’Istituzione Negata, a collective operate (edited by Basaglia) that described the radicalism of the Gorizia experiment. It became an instantaneous bestseller and, along with a successful Tv documentary, manufactured him famous.

There were, though, tragic incidents. Giovanni Miklus was launched for a day in September 1968 and, that same afternoon, killed his wife with a hammer. Basaglia and 1 of his colleagues had been accused of manslaughter, even though each had been at some point cleared. In February 1972, when Basaglia was director of the asylum in Trieste, a guy called Giordano Savarin was released and duly murdered both his mother and father. Basaglia and another colleague had been once again experimented with for manslaughter and, once again, each had been cleared.

In 1977, a lady who had been turned down for treatment method at Gorizia drowned her four 12 months-old son, Paolo, in the bath. These deaths reminded everybody that psychiatrists have been taking significant risks, and gave ample ammunition to those who desired the experimentation to quit.

In Italy, the literature on Basaglia tends in direction of either idealisation or demonisation – he’s regarded both a secular saint or a dangerous radical. John Foot provides a significantly much more rounded, and fair, portrait of a challenging, committed man: a medical professional who was a hefty smoker, a guy who distrusted energy but knew how to operate with it, somebody whose jacket pockets have been total of notes and numbers, who had the power to remain up all evening speaking but may fall asleep mid-conversation. His workplace door was often open. One buddy remembered that he utilised to reply the telephone in other people’s houses. He was driven, but often, it seems, grounded.

What’s interesting is that for all the adulation, Basaglia was circumspect about what he’d accomplished. He desired not to reform the institution of the asylum, but to abolish it. He didn’t want to produce a “golden cage”, but to do away with the cage altogether (one thing he later accomplished in Trieste). He recognised that he, himself, had become an institution, and was acutely mindful of the likelihood of getting co-opted. A single of his favourite lines, borrowed from Sartre, was that “Ideologies are freedom even though they are in growth, oppression when they are formed.”

Foot exhibits very plainly that Basaglia was component of a nationwide motion, rather than a lone idealist. There were several other psychiatrists and politicians struggling to do equivalent factors in other components of the country – in Parma, Reggio Emilia, Perugia and Arezzo – and the interaction in between the politicians and medics, among the outdoors and the within of the asylums, is constantly intriguing. Mario Tommasini, a crusader towards the horrors of the asylum in Colorno, is brilliantly portrayed. Basaglia’s wife, Franca, is shown to be an integral contributor to all the debates and books. Theéquipe in Gorizia is depicted not as some monolithic, united crew, but as a conflicted group attempting to accommodate various ideas and egos.

In numerous ways, the true story is what occurred soon after Basaglia’s law was passed: how households and communities did or didn’t cope with those launched sufferers, and how individuals sufferers themselves fared. The fates of individuals pioneering psychiatrists is also telling. Clancy Sigal, who with Laing aided set up Kingsley Hall and the Philadelphia Association, is quoted in a footnote observing that “many physicians and nurses” were burnt out by “too-near proximity to the fierce heat of schizophrenia”: the expense of changing aloofness with solidarity was typically incredibly higher. It all helps make for a fascinating, nuanced narrative in which the lines between the sick and the nicely, amongst the democratic free planet and a violent, repressive 1, are repeatedly blurred.

Tobias Jones’s A Spot of Refuge is published by Quercus.

• To purchase The Guy Who Closed the Asylums for £16 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or phone 0330 333 6846. Free United kingdom p&ampp in excess of £10, online orders only. Cellphone orders min p&ampp of £1.99.

The Guy Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Well being Care by John Foot – overview

Ageing revolution have to benefit us all | @guardianletters

‘By feeding a adverse narrative about ageing, Monbiot helps to delay severe debate on how to make certain that the ageing revolution advantages absolutely everyone,’ writes Alan Walker. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

As scientists attending the 64th annual scientific meeting of the British Society for Analysis on Ageing, we would like to respond to George Monbiot’s write-up (An elixir of life, if shared unequally, would be poison, eight July). His worries about the effect of our work seem to be: 1) population ageing is a difficulty only of the wealthy two) the cost of interventions that lengthen healthful lifespan will be “astronomical” three) such interventions will (a) strengthen tyranny, (b) develop a “geriatric underclass” and (c) exacerbate social inequality.

These impressions do not end result from conversation with the scientific mainstream. Nonetheless, we respond: 1) Ageing is a global problem. It ruins the top quality of daily life of older people in both wealthy and poor nations. It is offering the bad of the world short to pretend that only the wealthy increase old. two) Interventions that lengthen healthy lifespan will be cheap. A compound potentially efficacious in treating mild cognitive impairment is at present obtainable on the NHS for about £10 a day. The care expense to the NHS for these folks is at present about £60 a day. It is the promotion of well being, not the extension of existence, that is the purpose of our area.

3) With regard to dystopian visions, we propose the following: a) The “1,000-year Reich” was not ruled in excess of by a one,000-12 months fuhrer. The guy accountable for its depravities place a bullet in his head. This is how dictators will constantly meet their end. A treatment that improves later daily life health will no a lot more change this than did penicillin. b) A “geriatric underclass” already exists. By 85 nearly no one is in excellent well being. This is a social blight. Nonetheless, we hope that our function plays a tiny but substantial component in bettering factors. c) Scientific progress helps the poor. Denying the desirability of building therapy due to the fact they throw into sharp relief the previous political issue “who deserves what and why?” is perverse.

As biogerontologists, we believe that no one particular deserves a wretched previous age.
Professor Richard Faragher
University of Brighton
Professor Helen Griffith
Chair, British Society for Research on Ageing, Aston University
Professor Brian Kennedy
Buck Institute, USA and Editor in chief, Aging Cell
Professor Janet Lord
MRC-ARUK Centre for musculoskeletal ageing, University of Birmingham. Editor in chief, Longevity &amp Healthspan
Professor David Gems
University of London
Professor Peter Adams
University of Glasgow and Editor in chief, Aging Cell
Professor Valery Krizhanovsky
Weizmann Institute, Israel
Professor Claire Stewart
Liverpool John Moore’s University
Professor Anne McArdle
University of Liverpool
Dr James Brown
ARCHA Aston University
Dr Sue Broughton
Lancaster University, Centre for Ageing
Dr David Clancy
Lancaster University, Centre for Ageing
Dr Elizabeth Ostler
University of Brighton
Dr David Weincove
University of Durham
Dr Lesley Iwanejko
University of Liverpool
Dr Jennifer Tullet
University of Kent
Dr Suresh Ratten
University of Aarhus and Editor in chief, Biogerontology
Dr Don Ingram
Louisiana State University and Editor in chief, Age

• George Monbiot’s flight of fancy took off just following he reported his only instance of measured conclusions drawn from scientific investigation: that it may someday be possible, on the basis of rodent experiments, to slow ageing and delay multiple age-related illnesses. If realised this momentous outcome would reduce ache and enhance quality of existence for millions, but it is no a lot more than a distant likelihood. Yet Monbiot treats it as an established fact and launches into a rant.

Lone evangelicals like Aubrey de Grey catch the headlines with outlandish claims, this kind of as the one,000-yr lifespan that Monbiot repeats. But this speculation diverts our consideration from the much far more pressing issues of how to maximise healthier life expectancy between present generations of the two previous and young and make certain that the massive inequalities in lifestyle expectancies and well-getting are combated as rapidly as achievable.

Human life expectancy is growing, with no any genetic interventions, by an remarkable common of five hrs a day and, as a society, we are not prepared to meet this challenge. By feeding a negative narrative about ageing, Monbiot assists to delay serious debate on how to ensure that the ageing revolution benefits absolutely everyone.
Prof Alan Walker
Director, New Dynamics of Ageing Programme, University of Sheffield

• George Monbiot throws up a really intriguing query: if the science of life extension is advancing at this kind of a speed, how would we feed a population potentially a lot larger than recent projections in many years to come? As Mr Monbiot rightly notes in his piece, “grain is utilised to produce meat rather than feed folks directly” and this is wasteful. The actuality of today’s meals method – not in some dystopian long term exactly where individuals dwell to one,000 many years outdated – is that the grain presently fed to farm animals would feed an extra four billion folks. That is not to say that we should now or in the future automatically all be consuming a purely plant-based diet, but that we should be placing animals on ubiquitous pasture lands and using scarce arable lands to increase crops for individuals. No matter how lengthy we all reside, that would be a large frequent sense phase towards good food for everybody forever.
Philip Lymbery
CEO, Compassion in World Farming 

• George Monbiot’s concerns on hugely increased longevity had been foreseen in John Wyndham’s Difficulties with Lichen decades in the past. The clear resolution is for only individuals who are childless (so not me), sterilised and willing never ever to retire to be entitled to such remedy. Thoughts you, what’s so wonderful about all people moist November Sunday afternoons?
Iain Climie
Whitchurch, Hampshire

Ageing revolution have to benefit us all | @guardianletters

The Revolution Hidden In The Apple Health Kit

 Apple is about the modify the relationship in between manufacturers, data and consumers. That is the secret sauce in its new Wellness Kit offering, in accordance to several observers of data and security.

Greg Lloyd above at Traction Software, the collaborative function platform, puts it like this:

“Google, Yahoo and other folks collect correlate, analyze and use personalized identity metadata which includes your location, search historical past, browsing history to monetarize for their own functions or to sell to other folks. I think Apple is striving to create a counter story on security utilizing identity and services encapsulated in devices you very own.”

When you do enterprise with Google, as a client, you strike a deal. In return for free of charge search you get advertisements and for people adverts you agree to your data becoming collected, stored and sold on. The way Apple sees business up ahead, when you use an Apple well being service, Apple manages information for you, on your terms. That is a revolution.

Greg’s note of caution though is effectively advised since none of us know quite how Apple will put into action its new “kits”. In health in particular the ultimate answer will be determined by requirements that Apple may help to define. It’s also a extended road – well being is a conservative sector.

In purchase to uncover out more even though, and selecting up on Greg’s intimation of identity as the core of the solution, I spoke by way of e mail with David Waite and Paul Madsen at Ping Identity, experts in identity management,and Farid Fadaie, senior item manager at Bit Torrent, for an option view of security and identity in wellness.

These specialists have a particular interest in the use of identity and distributed systems as protection mechanisms.

The initial level to emerge from that discussion is that Apple has entered the wellness arena as an enabler. There is definitely a lesson there for each other enterprise considering or executing a platform technique.

Whatever Apple does down the line, first base is to allow nearby storage on the iPhone of information collected by other units,  says Waite

Short term it is totally on the mobile phone. They do not even assistance Overall health Kit on iPad (from what I realize) to have it function among my devices.

One particular of the 1st suppliers to throw their hat in the ring is WebMD, which is presently busy on an app to interpret sensor information.

HealthStation installation v1 (Photograph credit: juhansonin)

Madsen also sees Apple adopting an enabling position:

Apple is positioning itsHealth app as the level of aggregation for all the user’s distinct overall health information, and Health Kit the growth platform to allow that integration.  But critically, indications are that the health data will for the most element be collected by sensors (Nike+, Withings Scale, Fitbit Flex and so on) of other wearable manufacturers…. providing – i..e remain away from the hardware for now and rather give the solutions &amp computer software glue to tie all the present hardware into some sort of cohesive entire.

A single purpose for that may well be security. The iPhone (at least the later versions) have fingerprint sensor safety. If well being data passes among an iPhone and an iPad how can the gadget(s) be sure of the user’s identity? On a single gadget, particularly the iPhone that has fingerprint access, identity is solvable on the gadget.

With multiple devices it turns into more hard and far more prone to the complexity of numerous customers.

They seem to want 1 gadget to represent a single persona, says Waite, – not a negative place for a hardware vendor to get. They encapsulate your on-line identity for services like Twitter and Facebook onto your device, but this is largely so that applications do not do this work themselves.

That also signifies Apple is searching to deepen the service worth of the smartphone, anything Samsung has been making an attempt to do. Samsung, nonetheless, has also additional more products (the Gear and Gear Fit in certain). Apple seems to be rallying the market back in direction of the iPhone.

It means Apple need to see the iPhone as a important profit center for years to come.

It does also indicate however that Apple need to now innovate quickly in services. As Wellness Kit builds momentum, Apple will be in need to have of a new identity solution Madsen says. Its try, in the near potential, to parlay data in between institutions and products.

….totally demands an underlying standardized identity layer that would give the required protection for the overall health information as it flows, and the end users the requisite privacy-enabling manage more than that flow.

The Revolution Hidden In The Apple Health Kit

Melinda Gates on the worldwide family planning revolution video

Two many years on from the London Summit on Family members Planning, Melinda Gates, businesswoman and co-chair of the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, discusses the progress produced on tackling the issue. She explains how initiatives to widen entry to contraception have had a good impact on girls and ladies in creating nations. She also stresses the relevance of sexual wellness training in nations such as Niger, which has one of the highest fertility prices in the world

Melinda Gates on the worldwide family planning revolution video

The NHS needs a leadership revolution | Michael West

Horizon scanning … NHS boards should prepare very carefully for the amount and design of leaders they will require for the potential. Photograph: WestEnd61/Rex

There are a growing number of warnings about the issues NHS leaders face. An ageing population with a lot more complex overall health demands, a difficult financial climate with no expectation of substantial new money, expanding worries about employees pressure amounts, public expectations that care must be delivered with compassion and respect – there are just some of the concerns NHS senior staff are getting to grapple with. They call for revolutionary alter to the way care is designed and provided they also call for a revolution in leadership.

The difficult, complex and modifying surroundings of the NHS requires our leaders to collaborate and co-operate across boundaries, among – not just within – their organisations. We want more emphasis on team and inter-staff doing work and considerably higher involvement of frontline employees.

The correct cultures of care will not emerge overnight. You are not able to mandate compassion in an e-mail from the chief executive. For employees to have a clear thought of the specifications they should meet requires time, dedication to the growth of men and women and teams – and a plan.

These new leadership capabilities will not emerge by chance. We should program for the leaders with the capabilities necessary in area ahead of time. This will call for method rather than piecemeal options to leadership and organisation improvement. And core to these abilities and to the technique for developing them is a recognition that we want collective leadership. We need to have leaders who make the accomplishment of their neighborhood overall health and social care program their priority, not just the achievement of their individual region. So we should attract leaders who will take the correct method to delivering care for the future.

In result, we need to have all leaders to move overall health and social care organisations from fragmentation to integration from tribes to interdisciplinary and inter-organisational teams from inner focus to external concentrate from domination and manage to enabling collaboration from secrecy to transparency and from conflict and conflict avoidance to doing work by way of.

Leadership is the most important influence on culture – every interaction by each and every leader in healthcare shapes the culture of their organisations. The ideal leaders advertise participation and involvement as their core technique market suitable employees autonomy and accountability for improvement guarantee employees “voices” are encouraged encourage personnel to be proactive and revolutionary steer clear of command and management except in crisis consider action to handle systems problems and needless tasks that avoid staff from delivering high good quality care deal efficiently and swiftly with quarrelsome, rude and disruptive behaviour and poor overall performance, particularly (but not solely) amid senior staff and, above all, they model compassion in dealing with individuals and employees.

The most efficient NHS boards are now preparing for the variety of leaders they will require in every single spot the attributes they will need of these leaders  preparing to make sure that varied groups are appropriately attracted and appointed to leadership positions at every single degree and attracting strong fields of candidates from clinical backgrounds.

The urgent problems require sensible and extended-term answers. The King’s Fund is therefore doing work with the not-for-revenue Center for Imaginative Leadership in North Carolina to aid NHS organisations develop the leadership techniques and abilities they need to have. Hopefully, that need to ensure continually enhancing, large top quality, compassionate care to all in our communities.

Michael West is a senior fellow at the King’s Fund. The King’s Fund, in partnership with the Center for Creative Leadership, published two reviews on collective leadership to coincide with its NHS leadership summit.

Are you a member of our online community? Join the Healthcare Pros Network to get typical emails and exclusive delivers.

The NHS needs a leadership revolution | Michael West

Revolution in the head: Kitten Pyramid carry rock to the psychiatric ward

A tin of chicken soup, a Kinder egg, a bag of salt and vinegar crisps, and a sponge. These are the things I am offered, in a carrier bag, when I arrive in Shrewsbury to set off on tour with Kitten Pyramid – Britain’s most current, and probably most surreal, purveyors of prog rock. “Your welcome pack,” says bass player Mark Hamon, who has a tufty yellow beard and a tattoo of an octopus on his proper shin. “What is the sponge for?” I request. Hamon’s smile broadens. “You will locate out.”

In the globe of Kitten Pyramid, such a random assortment of objects tends to make a kind of sense. Formed in Burton upon Trent in 2010 by songwriter Scott Milligan, the band is a loose 5-piece, swelling to 14 for some gigs (when the core guitars, bass and drums are joined by trumpets and strings). Out this month, their very first album is called Uh-Oh! and is pitched someplace between Talking Heads at their most fractious and unusual, and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

Lyrically, Milligan’s songs are each hilarious and bizarre. “I want to see you naked in a caravan,” he reveals on Chester. Elsewhere, he sings the praises of “gorilla fajitas”, “ladybird jumpers”, and a “pyramid army with their bags of peshwari”. Clearly, Milligan is bored by typical pop. But significantly of Uh-Oh!’s freshness and richness springs from the fact that it truly is a concept album inspired by Milligan’s late Uncle Jarek, a Polish immigrant who had schizophrenia.

To launch it, and to draw interest to the issues all around psychological overall health, Kitten Pyramid have place together their personal idiosyncratic tour – of psychiatric hospitals, performing for sufferers and personnel, with each daytime hospital session followed by an evening gig in a pub. Their aim is to increase funds for, and awareness of, Arts for Wellness (AFH), an arm of the band’s local NHS trust, South Staffordshire and Shropshire, which organises arts events for sufferers.

All of which explains why, even now puzzled by my welcome pack, I am watching Kitten Pyramid complete in Redwoods hospital on the outskirts of Shrewsbury. The gig requires area in the vibrant, domed foyer, all around a splendid grand piano, with a string of fairylights marking out a makeshift stage. The band kick off quietly, strumming through Red Footwear, a song that traces feelings of alienation in a supermarket. “You can’t look down,” Milligan sings, “since she’ll consider you happen to be weird.” The lady sitting beside me has a complaint. “I can’t hear you!” she shouts. “Louder?” asks Milligan. “Yes!” the audience phone back as one.

John, sitting subsequent to me, tells me he lately misplaced his wife, Glenys, to early-onset Alzheimer’s. They employed to go to singing workshops run by AFH. “Even when she was hardly able to communicate,” says John, “she could even now sing total lines from her favourite songs. Music is incredibly effective for folks with dementia. It seems to stir up so many memories.”

Surely, one thing equivalent seems to be happening nowadays. As the band play Whale, a track that calls for the audience to shout the song’s title at standard intervals, even the most distracted patients look to sharpen their target. An elderly girl with a cotton cloud of white hair taps out a regular rhythm on the footrest of her wheelchair. “It was wonderful,” she tells me afterwards. “I used to be a ballet dancer. Listening to the music brought it all back.”

Jessica Kent, the AFH manager behind the concert, thinks the band went down properly. “Kitten Pyramid have a exclusive sound,” she says. “It really is like a musical patchwork, with some thing all ages seem capable to relate to. It’s so crucial to have occasions like this in psychiatric hospitals. The age of the asylum is in excess of. New psychiatric hospitals are really different areas.”

As we all sit down to post-gig fish-finger sandwiches in a nearby pub, Milligan tells me the album’s notion began with a bus. “Exactly where I used to live,” he says, “was opposite a bus-quit. I was sitting in my bedroom a single day, seeking out the window, when a bus arrived. I started thinking how weird it would be if I climbed into a bus with no driver, no passengers, and the bus took me to Burton, and there was nobody anyplace. Then I started to feel that possibly this was the type of issue my Uncle Jarek utilised to knowledge.”

Milligan fleshed out his daydream until he had a thorough therapy for a movie (his day work entails making lawyer education video clips). In the meantime, he set about bringing together musicians to function on songs he’d composed above the final decade. He soon realised most of them touched, to some extent, on Jarek’s condition. “One song, Fire, is about the time my uncle set fire to a brand-new mattress,” he says. “Not all the songs are that specific, but a great deal of them seem to relate to what my uncle went via.”

Kitten Pyramid have been born. Milligan secured a bank loan to record an album and, in January 2013, the core five-piece – Milligan, Hamon, drummer Rob Redfern, guitarists Chris Baldwin and Dan Baker – went into the studio with producer Nick Brine, best recognized for his work with Oasis, the Stone Roses and Super Furry Animals. Uh-Oh! was the result.

The difficulty with concept albums is that they can be a bit, effectively, conceptual: they can risk sacrificing musical coherence to higher-artwork pretension. But Milligan’s songs would even now make an affect without having any expertise of the underpinning concept. “What sets this apart from other notion albums,” says Baker, “is that we’re not ponces.”

Milligan is still arranging to make his movie. Every single band member has been assigned a character: Milligan a psychiatric nurse, the luxuriantly bearded Baker a bear. There is also talk of a musical. All this from a band that are unsigned. When I ask if they’re seeking for a significant label, Milligan looks anxious. “This way,” he says, “we have more freedom.”

They are creating no cash from their tour: the hospital concerts are unpaid, and they are donating a pound to AFH from every single CD sale. What’s more, they’ve all had to consider time off from their day jobs, which assortment from teaching to construction. There is no tour bus both: sustained by Coca-Cola and elaborate in-jokes about dolphins, they are travelling in a Ford Emphasis and a Volkswagen Polo, despite the fact that occasionally they get to pile into the “jaffa cake”, Hamon’s orange and brown VW campervan. Their stimulants of decision are “dad naps” (they range in age from 31 to 45, and they all have younger youngsters) and vitamin drinks spiked with Solpadeine.

It is all really un-rock’n"roll – and rather refreshing and cheering, specially when it’s clear how nicely the band’s gigs go down, the two in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Following Redwoods, they hit an open-mic night in the Wrekin Inn in Telford, in which the walls are lined with posters for the 1960s psychedelic band the Groundhogs (its founding member Tony McPhee’s spouse, Jo, runs the open mic). Kitten Pyramid blow the spot away, with shouts of “Whale!” threatening to lift the roof. By the end of the set, two locals (“Juke Joint” John and “Dead Hand” Terry) have joined them on harmonica and kazoo.

The subsequent day takes us to St George’s in Stafford, where Milligan’s uncle was once admitted. Kitten Pyramid are playing two concerts. The very first is on a ward filled largely with elderly sufferers. Amongst songs, an previous man in a hospital gown shouts huskily: “Brilliant!” His name is Tony and he loves the blues. “Loved this, also,” he says. “They blew my head.”

Later, in a treatment room, the band carry out shoeless and cross-legged beneath a board advertising lessons: Monday is rest, Wednesday coping abilities. I am not confident which category Kitten Pyramid fall into, but their flight-of-fancy lyrics and helter-skelter guitarwork go down a storm. After the concert, one patient comes above. “Hopefully I’ll get out quicker now,” he says with a grin. “You’ve put me back on my feet.”

It is this kind of response that makes all the hassles – the lengthy drives, the dad naps, the Solpadeine cocktails – worthwhile. “Which is what it really is all for,” Hamon says as we load the products back into the vehicles. With my relatively surreal stint as roadie now at an end, I seem yet again within the bag they gave me. I never got the opportunity to eat the chicken soup – and I nevertheless have no notion what the sponge was for.

• Uh-Oh! is out on 26 Could. Kitten Pyramid play Newhall Social Club on thirty May possibly and the Alsager Music Festival in Milton Park on twelve July. Particulars: kittenpyramid.squarespace.com

Revolution in the head: Kitten Pyramid carry rock to the psychiatric ward

The New Revolution in Fish Oils

So what’s in your fish oil?

Is it produced with Chinese fish oil?  Odds say that you are consuming low nutrient fish from China.  Mackerel, herring and sardines are the ideal fish for making fish oil.  Nevertheless, with a $ 1.8B US demand, the substantial-high quality producers of fish oil can not stay up with globally demand.  Massive farms with tilapia and carp have been identified in Chinese producers of fish oil energy destined for the US.

My Bottle Says Produced in the USA

Doesn’t really matter, rest assured that a firm looking for profits will locate a way to get about the regulation.   In the US, nation of origin is determined by vague laws that can be effortlessly skirted with the most simple legal expertise.  Acquiring a bulk supply of cheap oil from China, then bottling it in the US qualifies it as a Created in the USA solution!!

The greatest sellers of fish oil in the US &amp Canada probably really do not even know where they are receiving their fish oil.  There isn’t any variety of regulation procedure that says including 95% bottom dweller fish oil cannot be mixed with 5% cold water fatty fish – then calling it ‘Premium Fish Oil’.

What Can I do?

There are a number of simple indicators that nearly ensure it, but it is impossible to inform.

Mass sellers of fish oil CAN NOT Produce Enough large quality fish oil.  Wal-Mart might offer you a fantastic deal on drugs, but you can virtually promise that it is imitation oil.

You could call up the seller of your fish oil and request particularly the place all the fish have been harvested.  If you get an response we would really like to hear from you!!  Chances are they do not know in which they got all of it they just employed a broker to make sure their demand was met.

Fish Oil Revolution?

Fish oil has also many disadvantages and is quickly currently being replaced.  That horrible smell that end result in burps and stomach concerns are just dying fish components and the public is now realizing that.  The capsule or pill is practically nothing far more than a technique of trying to preserve the dying and processed animal till it is consumed.

Why do we have to kill fish to get the crucial fatty acids and other nutrients they provide?  You really don’t!  Their nutrients come from decrease on the foods chain, from the plant-like phytoplankton they feed on.  Phytoplankton feeds more of the world’s animal existence then all other foods combined!!

The very very first alternative to fish oil has been created and is now currently being offered dwell!  It is superior to fish and krill oil in practically each imaginable way.  Taking live PhytOriginal on a day-to-day basis gives the very same nutrients as the highest top quality fish oil – but is guaranteed the very best.

PhytOriginal is grown and distributed from Chicago in a state-of-the-art development clean area.  Every batch is made utilizing the finest good quality and strain of phytoplankton with pure Nannochloropsis oculata marine phytoplankton.

Find out more now.  PhytOriginal is dwell, renewable, natural, natural, pure, Created in the USA……

The New Revolution in Fish Oils

Jeremy Hunt guarantees revolution in care for dementia sufferers

Mr Hunt produced the commitments at an international summit in Paris the place he hailed scientific advances which could bring about predictive tests for such problems inside of five years.

He said Britain needed to discover from the French model of care, where loved ones medical professionals had been more most likely to detect attainable signs of the disease, although a national network of memory clinics ensured a lot more speedy diagnosis and therapy.

Tomorrow he will announce that Marks &amp Spencer, Argos, Homebase and Lloyds Banking Group have committed to signal up a lot more than 120,000 staff to undergo instruction to assistance consumers with dementia, bringing the complete numbers of such volunteers to 250,000.

Mr Hunt said: “How we react to dementia is the litmus test of whether or not we can encounter up to the challenge of an ageing population, and do so in a way which permits compassion and dignity.

“Dementia can be a horrific and heartbreaking ailment, but it is my mission as Health Secretary to make this nation the best spot in the world to get a dementia diagnosis, as effectively as a worldwide leader in the battle to find a cure.” He said that the “global race” to locate a cure or successful treatment was generating some considerable advances, with Britain generating a key contribution in the direction of analysis.

David Cameron will tomorrow announce the appointment of a Planet Dementia Envoy. Dr Dennis Gillings, an specialist in clinical analysis trials, will create a Planet Dementia Council to stimulate innovation and development of treatment method for these with dementia.

The Wellness Secretary mentioned that waiting times of 6 weeks or fewer for an assessment for suspected dementia had been attained in three quarters of the country, but that there had been remaining locations with “significantly longer” time frames which have been not acceptable.

Mr Hunt explained: “There is nonetheless a minority of GPs who do not feel it is worth providing a person a dementia diagnosis. In fact, we know that a timely diagnosis can mean medicines to aid stave off the condition in about one in 3 folks and it can also imply putting assistance and ideas in spot for households striving to cope with the reality that a person has dementia.”

Some family members physicians did not place a priority on diagnosing this kind of patients since they feared small would be completed for them — a “justifiable” concern in some areas, he advised.

Official NHS statistics present that sufferers with suspected dementia are waiting 25 weeks for assessment by Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Basis Trust’s memory clinic, with waits of 21 weeks at the centre run by Sheffield Overall health &amp Social Care NHS Believe in.

At Harrow memory clinic, run by Central and Northwest London NHS Basis Believe in, and East Lancashire memory evaluation services, run by Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Believe in, waiting times are 18 weeks while at Basildon memory services, run by South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Believe in, waiting times are 15 weeks.

Ministers have also promised to make certain that 66 per cent of people with dementia have received a diagnosis by the time of the following election in Could 2015.

1 in three individuals will produce dementia, figures demonstrate. But Department of Wellness estimates propose that just half of the 670,000 folks in England suffering from the ailment acquire a diagnosis.

Mr Hunt met neurologists from the Paris Institute of Translational Neurosciences, which has carried out 3D scans of the brains of dementia sufferers.

Within five years, this kind of mapping of the brain could lead to exams which could predict a person’s potential likelihood of struggling from the condition.

Jeremy Hunt guarantees revolution in care for dementia sufferers

The health-related data revolution is good for your well being

Overall health information have been collected since the Eighties, with every hospital admission nationwide tracked. Care.data – the new programme from NHS England, where information are currently being brought collectively at the Overall health and Social Care Info Centre (HSCIC) – is just expanding the method to cover out-of-hospital care, such as prescriptions and GP check benefits. This isn’t a sudden harvesting of patient data, but a completion of what is presently there, to offer a much better-informed overall health services that, in flip, advantages patients. The HSCIC is legally prohibited from producing a revenue from offering data it is unlawful to make confidential details available for the functions of promoting any sort of insurance and it can only ever be disclosed exactly where allowed by law, as in a public wellness emergency or with explicit patient consent.

I saw this for myself when I was involved in a undertaking with King’s School London. MRI brain scans and healthcare histories from 250,000 patients in the South London Mental Overall health Trust had been put into 1 database, which academic researchers are now in a position to study – in anonymised kind – to uncover new treatment options for hard-to-deal with illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

Better information can lead to new drugs, much better treatments and far more lives saved. It can also transform study, and assist to shed a light on poorly doing hospitals, making sure scandals such as Mid Staffordshire can never happen yet again. And it can empower individuals. No one today would be material to be denied access to their banking information. Nor need to they put up with becoming stored in the dark on their wellness: we need to move overall health from being anything done to you by government to some thing citizens take accountability for themselves.

In truth, although Care.data is a good commence, we need to have to go much even more. 10 many years ago, the very first human genome was sequenced at the Sanger Centre, a mile to the south of Cambridge. It took £100 million and more than ten many years of focused scientific effort. Right now, breakthroughs in genetics and computing make it possible to sequence a human genome for £1,000 in 24 hrs.

Clinics are appearing all around the planet providing personalised cancer treatment, with medicines tailored to your certain issue. This is crucial, simply because the more we discover about medication, the more we realise that our present pharmaceutical model is broken. It turns out that various patients respond to different conditions and medicines in distinct techniques – so plying everybody with the very same remedy no longer works. The result is that we are wasting billions providing the wrong drugs to the wrong patients. Personalised and genetically tailored medicines would resolve that.

From the invention of the railways to the launch of the net, the potential has often appeared a threat to the existing. But the basic question remains: who wants to live far better for longer? With the correct precautions in spot, this information revolution is a force for very good. We need to embrace it.

George Freeman is Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk and founder of the Patients4Data campaign

The health-related data revolution is good for your well being

CVS retailers will no longer promote cigarettes. It truly is the well being in excess of profit revolution | Nicholas Freudenberg

The CVS decision announced nowadays to stop marketing tobacco merchandise at its 7,600 pharmacies around the United States by 1 October is an critical step forward for public health – and for tobacco manage activists.

In accordance to Forbes, CVS CEO Larry Merlo believes that

continuing to promote cigarettes, which the Surgeon Common blames for 480,000 deaths every single year from heart ailment, lung cancer, and stroke, was anathema to CVS’ prolonged-phrase program to turn out to be a central player in the US healthcare program.

The CVS choice demonstrates that in excess of time, well being activists and public opinion can adjust corporate managers’ revenue-loss calculus. CVS predicts it will drop $ 2bn of $ 125bn in yearly revenues.

Possibly ironically, a huge chunk of CVS revenue come from medicines and supplies essential to deal with continual problems brought on by tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food consumption. The World Health Organization has identified these three goods as principal triggers of the growing epidemics of diabetes, heart ailment and cancer. By 2030, specialists predict, these illnesses, which previously trigger more than 60% of all deaths throughout the world, will cost the worldwide economy an estimated $ 47tn.

From a public wellness viewpoint, the CVS determination is very good news since study demonstrates that the ubiquity of unhealthy merchandise contributes to their overuse. The more locations individuals can buy and eat alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, salty snacks and quickly foods, the more they ingest. Alcohol, tobacco and processed meals companies know that straightforward entry triggers the cravings or addictions their items are made to elicit. Generally, they vociferously oppose any limits on their right to place their wares within arm’s reach. The choice by the nation’s 2nd largest pharmacy chain to decide on a distinct path exhibits that public mobilization, modifying social norms and regulation can combine to persuade at least some organizations to decide on the higher street.

So maybe the next stage for CVS and equivalent chains is to get rid of the candy, soda and snacks that contribute so significantly to diabetes. Perhaps cities and states that want to safeguard younger individuals from agonizing illnesses and premature death can use their zoning laws to limit the quantity of retailers selling unhealthy items. Alcohol, food and tobacco companies will, of course, increase the bogeyman of the nanny state, suggesting that any hard work to limit accessibility to sickening goods interferes with our freedom and absolves men and women of their obligation to protect their overall health.

But that argument is silly no a single is suggesting prohibition. Isn’t enticing children and youthful people to consume products that put them at chance of premature death and preventable sickness the height of irresponsibility? Wouldn’t most societies charge a nanny with youngster abuse if he or she tried to bypass parents to motivate children to begin risky habits? By hunting for extra techniques to persuade organizations that the public will not tolerate profiting from promoting condition, we inspire a lot more corporate leaders to do the proper point.

CVS retailers will no longer promote cigarettes. It truly is the well being in excess of profit revolution | Nicholas Freudenberg