Falls (Swiss cheese and serious harm)
I wonder What is the rule for hospital Inpatient falls. I mean, There must be some Golden Rule That […]
See you later. I’m going home.
Sure, we know that unnecessary hospitalisation is bad, but what about inappropriate institutionalisation?
Unsafe admission
The example being:
89-year-old woman, lives alone, dementia, diabetes, COPD, has fallen, bruised face – best admit.
And this is the thing.
Medically fit – today and tomorrow (3)
You hear this term all the time nowadays, at least, if you work in an NHS hospital, are an inpatient […]
Decisive Moment
Cartier-Bresson's Decisive Moment, my patients falling, examining life and projecting forwards.
Geriatric fall
Tabloids love these figures as it allows them to get away with saying… ‘Hospital H – death rate is twice the national average!’ Subtlety is usually lost in these situations.
Long lie
Two days.
That is a very long time.
Restraint.
Today, when you suffer, I feel pain. I can’t shut out your experience.
We exist as a community, if not we perish as individuals.
Stick
Indeed, the last walking stick I saw came to a bad end when it wasn’t used as a walking stick.
Night at the hospital
There is an assumption that when the lights go down and the night-staff appear on the scene that things become quiet and still – a little like a scene from Bambi.
Just what are we doing?
Snap – your left hip.
1328 and some
‘Did my dad die because someone didn’t follow policy, didn’t pay attention or, was the outcome inevitable?’ ‘Might my mum have survived the operation if she had a different surgeon or she was at a different hospital?’
Medicines, etc.
Nevertheless, within the dark underbelly of medicine, where geriatricians live, there are some quite stunning effects often, from stopping and sometimes starting medicines.
Gut microbiome, antibiotics and older people
We, the homeostatic organisms that have evolved over the past four billion years, exist in a state of serenity when well, but things can be thrown out of kilter by disease.
The Interceptors
The point, as is often the case, is my aversion to patients. Or rather, the existential construct that relates to the ‘patient state’ = they who suffer; with the principal goal of my life being to obviate suffering, my objective is to really stop people turning into patients.
And that is the role of the interceptors.
You don’t know what you’ve got…
And so, to my colleagues, the team of Mallard, I say, here we are – we are something special, we are the exception to the exception that allows magical things to happen.
