Stats, stats and more stats

If you are ever looking for statistics about health and social care in the UK, don't miss out the NHS Information Centre.  It has statistics about hospitals, health and lifestyles, social care, and mental health.  If you want to know how many school kids have taken drugs, or how much GPs earn, or how many hip replacement operations took place last year, this is the place to look.

Research jargon

If you get confused by research and want to know what it all means, have a look at this user-friendly NHS glossary.  It explains the differences between different types of studies, and has lots of difficult-to-understand concepts explained in a nutshell in layman's terms.

Draft Care and Support Bill published

The proposed Care and Support Bill was published in draft by the Department of Health yesterday.  This new wide-ranging Bill aims to provide a single piece of legislation to cover adult care and support in England.  You can read the draft Bill and supporting documents here.

Achieving high quality care for people with complex needs

Last month The King's Fund hosted a conference on how to coordinate care for people with complex age-related chronic conditions.  The presentations from the day are now available on the website, and are well worth a look.

Up To Date

Up To Date is a (very expensive) database which is designed to support clinical decision making.  We don't have it at the University, but if you are lucky enough to work or have placements at the Luton & Dunstable Hospital you can access it via the hospital intranet.  Most of the content is advanced and designed for consultant-level specialists, but there is some free patient information available which might be very useful for your assignments or background reading.  If you go to the Up To Date website, then make sure the search box is set to 'Patient', you will be able to search all the free content.  The range of topics is huge and definitely worth a browse.

Cochrane Library latest podcasts

Sorry for the extended lack of blogging.  To ease myself back into it, here's a nice reminder about the latest Cochrane Library podcasts.  Podcasts are a really nice way of getting to grips with the latest health research without having to digest an entire systematic review.  Latest topics include dementia, asthma, polypharmacy and smoking cessation.  You can listen here.