RECENT NEWS

Acute heart failure is the leading cause of hospital admission in people over 65, and accounts for more than 67,000 people being admitted to hospital in England each year. All people admitted to hospital with suspected acute heart failure should receive treatment from a dedicated specialist heart failure team.

Treatment with xenon gas after a head injury reduces the extent of brain damage, according to a study in mice.

A candidate Ebola vaccine is being given to healthy volunteers in the UK, The Gambia and Mali, as part of a series of safety trials of potential vaccines aimed at preventing the disease that has killed more than 1,400 people in the current outbreak in West Africa.

The Royal College of Physicians is calling on Government and politicians to ‘stop reorganising the NHS from the top down’, to ‘increase funding to avoid a crisis in care’, and to ‘commit to an NHS free at the point of delivery’.

New guidelines on cardiovascular assessment and management in non-cardiac surgery were presented at the recent ESC Congress 2014 in Barcelona.

BMI The Blackheath Hospital has officially opened a new operating theatre department as part of phase one of a £3.8 million investment project that will modernise the hospital’s theatre and upgrade its critical care provision.

A new report by the Health Foundation is calling for more support for providers of NHS care in England to ensure quality of care for patients does not deteriorate.

A new toolkit from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and The UK Sepsis Trust has been developed to help doctors recognise and treat sepsis on acute care wards.

Manchester scientists are establishing how to safely increase the radiotherapy dose given to lung cancer patients – potentially offering improved local control and survival.

Two independent reports show death rates following a joint replacement or hip fracture have fallen over the last ten years.

Each year, around 62,000 people in England have a serious allergic reaction to a drug which puts them in hospital. A recent analysis from the National Reporting and Learning System revealed that in many of the instances where people suffered harm, they had been given a drug to which they were already known to be allergic.

A stroke therapy using stem cells extracted from patients’ bone marrow has shown promising results in the first trial of its kind in humans.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has announced that independent hospitals will begin to be inspected under its new inspection approach. The chief inspector of hospitals, Sir Mike Richards has identified eight independent hospitals to be inspected. These vary in size and in the number and type of services they provide, including both NHS-funded care and solely private care.

The Department of Health has announced plans to recruit more physician’s assistants (PAs) to provide increased support in the diagnosis and management of patients in hospitals. There are already over 200 PAs working in the UK in a range of healthcare settings.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has launched an online learning module for healthcare professionals on reducing the side effects of oral anticoagulants. Anticoagulants are vital medicines for treating and preventing blood clots. However, if the patient is not managed correctly their side effects can lead to a small number of people needing hospital treatment. With the right precautions, many of these side effects can be prevented.

The Chief Medical Officer's report has highlighted concerns about the 70 million working days lost to mental illness last year at a cost of up to £100 billion to the economy.

The Royal College of Surgeons of England launched Good Surgical Practice outlining clear standards expected of all surgeons. The guide outlines the skills, values and attitudes that underpin the profession and has been developed with surgeons and patient groups.

A transplant team at a Birmingham hospital has achieved a world first after resuscitating a liver that would have previously been considered unviable. Surgeons at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham successfully revived the organ for transplantation by pumping oxygenated blood through it after a journey of more than 200 miles inside an ice box.

Subtle genetic changes can be detected in the vapour given off by cells engineered to mimic the early stages of lung cancer, according to research published in the British Journal of Cancer.

A new study has revealed that one-in-six patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged.