The gargantuan scale of the patient backlog has now been exacerbated by Omicron. While staff absences and shortfalls are a much discussed hindrance, there are other issues that play a part in thwarting patient throughput.…
Self-monitoring or testing of blood cholesterol (SMBC) using hand-held devices or smartphones will be helpful in a number of distinct ways: Helping both the patient and clinician in being able to ascertain high or low…
Assessments and treatments for Musculoskeletal pain conditions have traditionally strived to identify structural or movement impairments which can be fixed. Developments in subjective questioning, physical examination and diagnostic investigation have provided great success for the…
The doctor’s role Multi-disciplinary pain clinics are nothing new. The founding-father of pain management Dr John Bonica who devoted his career to the study of pain, believed in a team approach, incorporating various specialties to…
Young as I like to think I am, I can still remember the days when hospitals had a subliminal military style discipline and a real sense of order. As soon as you walked onto the…
I have written and provided specialist pain management services at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital for over 14 years now. Every Trust has a unique and differing inward population into their services and in the…
The National Overprescribing Review estimates that 10% of medicines prescribed in primary care are unnecessary or harmful(1). The review concludes that overprescribing is caused by systemic and cultural factors. Failure to embed deprescribing into the…
The first commercially available pulse oximeter, a life-saving device that clipped on a finger and showed the level of oxygen in blood, was invented by Dr. Takuo Aoyagi, a Japanese Bioengineer in 1974. Monitoring of…
The two great challenges threatening humanity’s very existence are Covid-19 and Climate Change. Are there similarities between the two? If so what kind of linkages? Are there lessons to be learned from the handling of…
The Perfect Storm For as long as I can remember colleagues within the wider ENT community and in particular Audiology have talked about the perfect storm of Adult Hearing Loss. An ageing population, coupled with…
