Category Archives: Heart

Integrating health and social care?

Integrating health and social care? We’ll see, Mr Cameron

 

Millions of carers battling the system every day would welcome integration, but many will be sceptical of a breakthrough

 

David Cameron has reportedly ordered the integration of health and social care. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

The integration of health and social care services, as reportedly ordered by David Cameron, is the holy grail of public policy. More than a nice-to-have, it’s an absolute imperative if we are to maintain the 1948 welfare state settlement through the seismic demographic changes we are starting to undergo.

No one understands this better than the six million unpaid carers who every day have to negotiate the maddening demarcation lines between NHS services and social care provision funded – but these days rarely provided – by local councils. To secure and sustain a package of care and support for their spouse, parent, child or neighbour or friend, carers know that invariably they will have to deal with multiple agencies. For most people, their GP is the nearest thing to a one-stop care shop. But rare as hen’s teeth is the surgery that offers an on-site gateway to social care services as well as health. The best that many patients or carers can hope to emerge with is a telephone number to call.

New test to identify which patients should take statins

Thousands of patients could be needlessly taking statins even though they are at low risk of suffering heart attacks or stroke, research suggests.

Scientists say they have found a much better way to work out which people are in danger of developing heart problems.

Half of the middle-aged adults they studied were found to have no coronary artery calcium, and only a handful of them went on to suffer a heart attack or a stroke.

They say the findings have “important public health implications” and could mean large cost savings if the cholesterol-lowering drugs are prescribed only for those whose health would genuinely be improved by taking them.

Do you want to be 1,000 years old?

Who wants to live forever? Scientist sees aging cured

ReutersBy Health and Science Correspondent Kate Kelland | Reuters – Mon, Jul 4, 2011

 

 

Related Content

  • An elderly couple sit on a bench next crocus flowers in a park in DuesseldorfAn elderly couple sit on a bench next crocus flowers in a park in Duesseldorf
  • Mon, Jul 4, 2011

 

LONDON (Reuters) – If Aubrey de Grey’s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to “cure” aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.