Giving patients USB technology improves prescribing safety

One in five patients experience an adverse event within 3 weeks of discharge from hospital back to the community. Medication error is a major cause of these adverse events and is potentially preventable. In an exploratory study conducted in Cork, Ireland, Walsh and colleagues have shown that giving patients a secure device using USB technology which allows sharing of their clinical and prescribing information between primary and secondary care, resulted in significantly fewer errors, including a complete absence of error relating to patient information data, legibility of prescriptions, and drug quantities. The technology appeared to work well with existing hospital and GP data systems, and the authors recommend a large-scale evaluation which will also include patients bringing the device with them at the time of hospital admission.
 

Earth Day

April 22nd is the 49th Earth Day – the first was in 1970 – and the Earth Day Network claims that a billion people take part in Earth Day activities each year. The Day follows the publication in The Lancet of  ‘A Call for Clinicians to Act on Planetary Health’. This is a global call to action, led by the Planetary Health Alliance, and co-signed by medical associations and healthcare organisations around the world. It seeks to mobilise clinical communities to get engaged, through joining the Clinicians for Planetary Health initiative, and follows the recent declaration by WONCA, which was distributed through its networks of over half a million family doctors, describing the health impacts of environmental change and various channels of action. The Planetary Health Alliance draws attention to the escalating problems of infectious diseases, greenhouse gases, cardiorespiratory illnesses, drought, declining pollinators, extreme weather, and their consequences for global physical and mental health. It provides its members and associated organisations with regular information and advice about getting involved and developing patient facing materials on planetary health.

The doctor is coming – whatever the weather!

Home visits represent over 13 million GP consultations throughout the UK each year, and any associations with weather patterns might have implications not only for patients, but also GPs’ workload and possibly for A&E attendances and ambulance usage. Melvyn Jones and colleagues at University College London studied links between weather patterns throughout the year and the provision of acute GP home visits in an out-of-hours service provided by GPs in Hertfordshire. They found that home visits increased on cold days and fell on sunny days, but did not find an overall impact of weather on home visiting rates. They concluded that GPs working in this out-of-hours system are able to deliver care to frail housebound patients in most weather conditions – a good news story for general practice and the NHS.