This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-politics-13792674
Friday, June 17, 2011
VIDEO: Why IVF treatment varies across England
Government guidelines say women between 23 and 39 should be entitled to three cycles of IVF on the NHS, but that is not happening in some parts of England.
Technique boosts post-op recovery
Before... patient Kathleen Oftedal undergoes knee surgery at Wrexham Maelor Hospital Doctors in north Wales say they have halved the time orthopaedic patients spend in hospital after major surgery like knee replacements.
Health services from around Europe are visiting the region to study the Rapid Recovery programme.
It helps patients to be walking again with hours of the operation and back at home sooner.
North Wales has become one of three centres of excellence for orthopaedic rapid recovery in Britain.
The process begins weeks before surgery, when patients are brought in to a special "joint school", and given the expectation of being mobile again within hours of an operation.
After... Kathleen Oftedal is walking hours after her knee operation The average hospital stay for knee replacement patients has been reduced from over six days to less than three.
Kathleen Oftedal from Wrexham needs a new knee - her second replacement in two years.
Traditionally, she would have needed a week in hospital to recover.
But doctors at Wrexham Maelor Hospital plan to have her back on her feet much sooner.
"They say that the sooner you get the joint working, the better it is," says Ms Oftedal.
"If you get the joint working straight away, you can dispense with the crutches much sooner - I'd rather be at home than in hospital."
According to Neil Windsor from Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB), the key is mobilising the joints as soon as possible.
"This isn't about rapid discharge - it's about timely discharge," he said.
Tony Smith Consultant“We are seeing much happier patients - they are much happier with the whole process, getting out of hospital more quickly”
"What's happening is the patients are in the same condition post-operatively on day one or day two or three than they were in day six or day seven.
"But the patients have got the confidence because we're spending that time with them at the pre-operative stage."
A faster throughput of patients will help save time and money for the BCUHB health board which manages hospital services, at a time when savings have to be achieved.
But, according to consultant Tony Smith, the programme is also improving their results.
"It looks as if our early complication rate - for example a re-admission to hospital for a thrombosis - seems to have gone down" he says.
"We are seeing much happier patients - they are much happier with the whole process, getting out of hospital more quickly.
North Wales has become one of three centres of excellence for orthopaedic rapid recovery in Britain, with teams from other countries such as Denmark visiting to study the way they work.
This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-wales-13777514
Unlocking potential
Ministers believe their reforms will lead to better care Primary care trusts, clinical senates and commissioning groups. The list goes on.
And yet, for most people, these terms will mean very little.
The government's NHS reform programme in England has been an epic saga. But it has almost entirely focused on structural changes and policy U-turns rather than the patient experience.
In truth, that is because the immediate effect on patients is hardly noticeable.
But in the long term the reforms could - if the government is right - herald a whole new era of health care.
The government has pushed ahead with the changes in the belief that they will help meet the twin challenge of rising demands and tightening budgets.
The simple response to such a scenario - and the one that ministers are keen to avoid - is rising waiting lists and ever-greater rationing of services.
But the alternative vision is one where through better decision-making the potential of the NHS to provide more effective and revolutionary care is unlocked.
So how could the patient experience change in the next five or 10 years if that does happen?
The rise of the super hospital
Stroke care has been redesigned in London Stroke services in London give a clue to what could happen in a whole host of complex areas of care.
Nearly two years ago services were redesigned so patients with symptoms were no longer taken to their nearest hospital.
Instead, ambulances ferry them to one of eight specialist centres that have expert staff and facilities on hand 24 hours a day.
The overhaul is estimated to be saving 400 lives a year and London is now rated as having the best stroke service in the country.
Similar moves are under consideration for other parts of the country and for other specialisms, from heart surgery to cancer care.
It raises the prospect of a network of super-hospitals being created.
But that in turn raises question marks about the future of district general hospitals that have been the bedrock of the health service since its inception.
Bringing the NHS into the patient's homeOne in three people has a long-term condition, such as asthma or diabetes.
Spending on their diseases takes up about 70% of the NHS budget, mainly because they end up in hospital too often.
But increasingly these groups of patients are being encouraged to "self-care" in an attempt to manage and control their conditions.
For something like diabetes that means monitoring blood-glucose levels - a relatively simple and inexpensive measure.
Advances in telecare are also offering promise.
In the US it is not unusual for patients to interact with their doctor over the internet or via mobile-phone technology.
From the hospital to the high street clinic and GP surgery
Cataract surgery has changed completely over the years When the NHS was created in 1948, patients undergoing cataract eye surgery spent a week in hospital, immobilised with sandbags to support their head.
Now the operation is done in 20 minutes, often in clinics rather than full-blown hospitals, with the patient released on the same day.
Similar revolutions are going on in other areas, allowing care to be shifted away from hospital settings into community clinics.
GPs are also getting in on the act, performing everything from minor skin surgery to vasectomies.
The trend has also spawned the creation of a series of enterprises set up by former NHS staff that are increasingly occupying the middle ground between the big private health firms and NHS providers.
In Eastbourne a nurse and occupational therapist have been running a wound-healing clinic for the past three years.
They get referrals from a host of local NHS trusts.
Many of the patients they see have struggled with their wounds for years, but eight in 10 patients are healed within six weeks.
This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/health-13767591
Thursday, June 16, 2011
VIDEO: Eurocopter debuts X3 rotorcraft
Eurocopter is set to debut its brand new X3 rotorcraft at the Paris Air Show next week. 
This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/business-13776355
Police drop MP sex assault case
Andrew Bridgen became an MP at last year's general election Police are to drop a sexual assault case against Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, a senior BBC correspondent has learned.
Mr Bridgen, North West Leicestershire MP, was arrested in the early hours of 9 June in central London.
The BBC understands the 46-year-old former Royal Marine was accused of assaulting a 29-year-old woman.
He denied the allegations and was not charged. It is believed police will not take the case any further.
This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-england-leicestershire-13799019
VIDEO: Vancouver riot after hockey final
Riot police in Vancouver use tear gas to quell violence following ice hockey cup final. 
This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-us-canada-13789612
What is a Bohemian Rhapsody?
BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs listeners have chosen Bohemian Rhapsody as their favourite pop song. It's the only number one about a murder trial to feature both opera and head-banging. But who is Bismillah, asks Alan Connor in his occasional series on song lyrics, Smashed Hits.
Freddie Mercury used a piano as the headboard of his bed. The double-jointed Mercury would awake with inspiration, reach up and back behind his head and play what he'd heard in his dreams. This was how Bohemian Rhapsody began.
Some 20,000 people bought the single every day in its first three weeks, it's been number one twice so far and it's played on a radio somewhere in the world about once an hour. It's also now been choosen as the favourite pop song of Desert Island Discs listeners.
It's no critics' favourite - the Melody Maker dismissed it on release as "Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates Of Penzance" - but it was the desert-island pop choice of Jackie Stewart, Anita Dobson and the British public.
So what's going on?
The essential story is not pop's greatest enigma: a man confesses a murder to his mother, vainly pleads poverty in a trial and ends up resigned to his fate. But questions remain: who did he kill and why? And why does the judge talk funny?
Smashed Hits 
Classic pop, reappraised by the Magazine
The Unswinging Sixties Who Was My Sharona? Why Does Everybody Hurt?Indeed, it's the language in the court scene that arouses most curiosity. There's a touch of Italian culture: Scaramouche is a buffoonish stock character in commedia dell'arte; Galileo was a Florentine astronomer found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition and Figaro is the title character of Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville, in which he helps true love to prevail.
Sticking with Spain, the fandango is a flamenco dance, which had appeared at number one eight years previously in A Whiter Shade Of Pale.
"Mamma mia", of course, means "my mother" in Italian - and was the title of the chart-topper which followed Bohemian Rhapsody - but it's also an exclamation in a moment of high drama. And that's how much of the song works. We don't need to be familiar with 16th-Century Italian theatre to know the "poor boy" is in some pretty serious trouble. The counsel for the defence tries to match the prosecution's ornate flourishes - "spare him his life from this monstrosity" - but it doesn't do much good.
Freddie Mercury, of course, enjoyed ornate language as much as spandex unitards and there's a sense of revelling in sound and phrase.
Senior Lecturer in English at UCL and Queen fan Matthew Beaumont says: "The architecture of Bohemian Rhapsody - and it is an architecture - is self-consciously, ostentatiously baroque. It is rich in ornate, curious details, occasionally Moorish in provenance. Also in soaring, sometimes dizzy-making, shifts of register and in a lachrymose emotiveness that is almost impossible to resist."
It's also impossible to resist seeking something autobiographical in the lyric. Paul Gambaccini told Kirsty Young: "Tim Rice has this theory that it's to do with [Mercury] coming to terms with being gay, and I think there's a lot in that - the resignation, the abandonment of a previous role." The allusions to persecution and secret love in Galileo, Figaro and the rest don't hurt this theory, but not everyone agrees.
In 2005, BBC news presenters at the time, Fiona Bruce, Bill Turnbull, Natasha Kaplinsky and Dermot Murnaghan, performed Bohemian Rhapsody for Children in Need. Murnaghan said Queen's music had been "the soundtrack to my school days".
In 2004, Queen's Greatest Hits became the first rock album allowed in Iran. The cassette came with an explanatory leaflet which insisted the hero "killed a man" by accident, then sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution he calls God in Arabic - "Bismillah" - and so regains his soul from Satan.
Ben Elton has offered a re-interpretation in the musical We Will Rock You, where Scaramouche and Galileo become singing rebels in a future society where rock music has been banned by baddies.
For many listeners, though, Bohemian Rhapsody is "about" sheer sonic bombast, as captured on film in Wayne's World. But its ambition - and its length - were nearly its undoing. Record company EMI was reluctant to release it as a single until the band slipped a copy to DJ Kenny Everett, who played it on Capital Radio 14 times over the following weekend, persuading EMI, the BBC and other sceptics that the listening public could handle it.
Queen also regarded the song as a mini-showcase of their technical skill. "We felt that Bohemian Rhapsody probably captured more or less all the types of moods that we were doing," Mercury told Phonograph Record magazine in 1976. "So we thought: OK, this is what we want to present to the public and let's see what they do with it."
The public's choice of "Bo Rap" as a desert-island favourite is also, perhaps, a vote for kitsch. It's a song about love, loss and death that's undoubtedly silly. "We viewed it quite tongue-in-cheek," Mercury insisted, but that lets you take it to heart as seriously as you like. "It's fairly self-explanatory," drummer Roger Taylor told the BBC, "there's just a bit of nonsense in the middle."
It was also Taylor who made possibly the most inspired decision during the recording sessions. He locked himself in a cupboard until everyone agreed the b-side would be his song I'm In Love With My Car.
Though less celebrated, Taylor's track automatically sold a copy every time someone bought Bohemian Rhapsody - with according royalties.
This article is from the BBC News website. � British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/magazine-13761091
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