Tag: pandemic

Disabled people and health care services

Getting our voices heard

Disabled people face poorer experiences of – and worse access to – health and care services than people who aren’t disabled and these health inequalities have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this context, it’s vitally important to include disabled people in planning, designing and developing health and care services. This King’s Fund long read, with Disability Rights UK sets out what we found out about how disabled people are currently involved in health and care service design, and what good might look like.

Key messages include:

  • 60 per cent of those who died from Covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic were disabled. The health inequalities disabled people already faced were made worse by the pandemic and a decade of austerity. In this context, it’s vitally important to include disabled people in designing and planning health and care system responses.
  • Health and care services need to understand the broad diversity of disabled people’s identities and experiences, and adopt a social model approach to disability, understanding that people are disabled by barriers in society, rather than by impairments or health conditions.
  • Health and care professionals need to value disabled people’s expertise through properly recognising the value of lived experience and ensure disabled people’s voices are central to any plans right from the start.
  • Disabled health and care staff are potential partners in this work, with their perspectives of both using and delivering services.
  • Disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) can strengthen their impact by working with other local DPOs and user-led organisations, understanding which parts of health and care systems they can best influence, and supporting health and care organisations to meaningfully engage with disabled people.
  • Both health and care organisations and DPOs need to improve their understanding of how people’s multiple identities shape their experiences, and embrace diversity of voices, opinions and challenges as an opportunity to think differently.
  • Ensuring disabled people’s voices are heard requires constant attention. While there are some examples of good practice, we heard many stories we heard where involvement wasn’t happening or felt tokenistic.

(The King’s Fund)

Covid 19 and Mental Health

The parallel pandemic

Source: Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) and NIHR

This report, produced together with the northern National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaborations (NIHR ARCs), shows that a parallel pandemic of mental ill health has hit the north of England with a £2 billion cost to the country at the same time as the Covid-19 pandemic. Mental health in England was hit badly over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. But people in the north performed significantly worse in their mental health outcomes compared to those in the rest of the country.

Was the NHS overwhelmed last winter?

Nuffield Trust

Throughout the pandemic, politicians and other policy-makers have emphasised the need to protect the NHS from collapse or overwhelm but even before Covid-19, the health service struggled to stay above water given worsening capacity, staffing and demand issues, especially during the colder months. This briefing looks at what happened to urgent and emergency hospital care last winter, when another wave of the virus hit the country during a time when it would be stretched to its absolute limits even without a pandemic.

Public Health

Current Awareness Updates

Smaller hospitals are urged to increase collaborative working to meet the needs of an ageing population.
NIHR Evidence; 2022.

[Collaborative working among staff is likely to be the best way to improve performance in smaller hospitals, a new study concluded. It explored the approaches smaller hospitals take to organising emergency care for people admitted to hospital. There were huge variations, but no single way of working (‘model of care’) was more effective than others.]

Eating Disorders.
Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN); 2022.
https://www.sign.ac.uk/our-guidelines/eating-disorders/
[This guideline provides recommendations based on current evidence for best practice in the management of people with eating disorders of all ages and gender groups, in any health or social care setting. Eating disorders covered are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and eating-disordered psychopathology occurring in the context of type 1 diabetes mellitus.]

HPV vaccination brings the WHO European Region closer to a cervical cancer-free future.
World Health Organization (WHO); 2022.
https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention/pages/news/news/2022/4/hpv-vaccination-brings-the-who-european-region-closer-to-a-cervical-cancer-free-future
[New data from one of the first countries in the Region to introduce HPV vaccination reveal just how well the vaccines work to prevent invasive cervical cancer. In England researchers found that the HPV immunization programme has almost eliminated cervical cancer in women born since 1 September 1995 (who were vaccinated at age 12−13). Incidence among these women of late-stage (grade 3) CIN that could later develop into cancer has also been significantly reduced.]

Community Network: ‘Hidden waits: The lasting impact of the pandemic on children’s services in the community’.
NHS Providers; 2022.

[The Community Network, which is hosted by the NHS Confederation and NHS Providers, has today published a new briefing which brings together new evidence about backlogs and increasing demand for children and young people’s services. It also demonstrates what community providers are currently doing to meet demand, including how they are innovating, and makes a series of recommendations on the national support needed, both now and in the longer term.]

Journal Article: Journal of Advanced Nursing

The prevalence of mental health conditions in healthcare workers during and after a pandemic: Systematic review and meta-analysis

This review aims to explore the prevalence and incidence rates of mental health conditions in healthcare workers during and after a pandemic outbreak and which factors influence rates.

For details of this article see here

To request the full text for this article email us at academic.library@lancashirecare.nhs.uk

Prevention in an ageing world

A window of opportunity

International Longevity Centre UK (ILC UK), April 7 2022

This report brings together ILC UK’s two-year global engagement programme on how to deliver prevention in an ageing world. It argues that while Covid has increased and exacerbated inequalities, it has also shown us how fast governments can act. There is a window of opportunity to build on the learnings from the pandemic. But governments need to act now.

Covid 19

Current awareness updates

Developing the nursing research agenda during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Froilan P. British Journal of Nursing 2022;31(5):294-295.
[The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the indispensable role of nurses in providing professional care and technical help to patients and their families. However, nursing science’s contribution to the body of knowledge in COVID-19 management, from its unique perspective, is not fully reflected in the existing literature. A preliminary review of studies noted that nursing seems to be subsumed into the knowledge of other disciplines.

Coronavirus Act report: March 2022.
Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC); 2022.
[The twelfth two-monthly report on which powers in the Coronavirus Act 2020 are currently active.]

Podcast

Tackling health inequalities

Source: The King’s Fund Podcast

Helen McKenna talks with Dr Bola Owolabi, Director of Health Inequalities at NHS England and NHS Improvement, about the NHS’s spheres of influence, the power of gathering around a common cause, and whether the experience of the pandemic will lead to a step change in tackling health inequalities.

Listen to the podcast here

Covid 19

Current awareness updates

Impact of Covid-19 on new parents: one year on: Government Response to the Committee’s First Report.
Petitions Committee; 2022.
[The government’s response points to the £500 million investment announced in the 2021 Autumn Spending Review for family and early years services. This report concludes that this goes some way to addressing the ‘baby blind spot’ in Covid-19 recovery spending identified in the Committee’s report but the response contains no new commitments in response to the concerns raised and recommendations made in the report.]

Volunteering and helping out in the COVID-19 outbreak.
Centre for Ageing Better; 2022.
[This report, based on research conducted by NatCen Social Research, aims to understand the patterns of formal volunteering and informal support that emerged in, and between, July 2020 and November 2020.]

Community connectedness in the COVID-19 outbreak.
Centre for Ageing Better; 2022.
[This report investigates how people across England related to their neighbourhoods as the COVID-19 pandemic challenged individuals and communities while reducing their access to traditional mechanisms of support.]

Covid 19

Current awareness updates

Student Space: An evaluation of a web-based intervention supporting student mental wellbeing over the pandemic.
Centre for Mental Health; 2022.
[This report is based on Centre for Mental Health’s independent evaluation of Student Space, which was launched by Student Minds in August 2020 to support the mental wellbeing of students during the pandemic. The report finds that the platform was a valuable extra resource for students’ mental health, and offered a high quality, rapid response to a crisis when it was set up in 2020.]

Understanding local patterns of volunteer activity during COVID-19.
The Young Foundation; 2021.
[This research, commissioned by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, seeks to improve understanding of the ways in which volunteers were mobilised at local authority levels in England during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the overarching aim to support future policy development on volunteering. The findings reflect the experiences of community organisations, local authorities and funding bodies, among others, during the spring and summer of 2020.]