Vitamin D for all?

Draft guidelines from an expert government nutrition committee in England recommend that we should all take a daily vitamin D supplement.

Current advice is that vitamin D supplements should only be taken by ‘at risk’ groups, which include pregnant women, infants under 5 and the elderly.

People get most of their vitamin D from the action of sunlight on their skin, but low levels of sunlight during the winter and spending hours indoors can put you at risk of deficiency.

Dietary sources of vitamin D are limited and oily fish is the principle source, although there are small amounts in egg yolks, red meat and some breakfast cereals.

Vitamin D is responsible for bone development and deficiency can result in rickets and brittle bones.

Our pharmacy will carry vitamin D 10mcg supplements, which is the recommended strength, and you can ask the pharmacist for further advice.

There are three methods of emergency contraception and they can be used up to varying time limits after unprotected sex.

The two emergency hormonal pills that are available are Levonelle, which can be taken up to three days after unprotected sex, and ellaOne, which can be taken up to five days after unprotected sex. Both are available from your pharmacy without prescription – ask your pharmacist.

A third option is an emergency intrauterine device (IUD), sometimes called the coil, which can be fitted up to five days after unprotected sex and can then be left to act as a regular method of contraception for five to 10 years, depending on the type.

A recent Family Planning Association survey found that more than one-quarter (29%) of sexually active women aged 16 to 54 have had unprotected sex in the last two years and did not use emergency contraception, despite saying they were not planning a pregnancy.

Is it worth the risk?

Foodmaestro for those with food allergies

FoodMaestro is a new online site with a free-to-download app aimed at those with food allergies and intolerances.

Created in partnership with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust, the site offers information on over 30,000 ingredients and immediate access to nutritional information on 100,000 UK food products via a built-in bar code scanner in the app.

Users can create personalised dietary profiles and personal product lists. They can find food products by name or keywords, and analyse them for nutritional value, and discover allergen information on each ingredient.

The new service is targeted at families with food allergies and intolerances to enable them to shop safely from home or at the supermarket. It could put dieticians, who spend hours researching and reviewing products to recommend to their patients, out of business!

Go to http://www.foodmaestro.me/consumer/  to find out what it’s all about.

‘A Chinese proverb states that ‘an elderly person at home is like a living golden treasure’. At the moment, around 40% of Chinese older people live with their children, but in Beijing they have a policy to increase that to 90% by 2020.

‘China even passed a new ‘elderly rights law’ against ‘neglecting or snubbing elderly people’, which mandates that people should visit their elderly parents often, no matter how far away they live, with fines or prison sentences as penalties.

‘Western traditions would rightly resist state interference on this scale. But France too passed an elderly care law in 2004 requiring its citizens to keep in touch with their elderly parents. They did this after a heatwave left 15,000 elderly dead, many of whom were left for weeks before they were found.’

These words are taken verbatim from a recent speech by the Health Secretary for England Jeremy Hunt. Given the growing number of pensioners and squeezed social care budgets, he was asking whether we should take more personal responsibility for our families – and looking at how other countries managed.

Know your score! Approximately 272,000 people in Kent are at high risk of alcohol-related problems. Kent County Council have developed a useful online tool to help you calculate how many units of alcohol you are consuming.

Live healthy. Don’t be one of those at risk by taking their ‘Know your score’ questionnaire here: http://www.kent.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/healthy-living/alcohol/know-your-score-quiz

The newspapers regularly carry headlines warning about the ‘privatisation of the NHS’. So how much patient care is being outsourced? The respected health think tank, the King’s Fund, has looked at the figures.

In the seven years since 2006-7, the proportion of NHS patients treated by non-NHS hospitals as in-patients has risen from around 0.5% (73, 000) to 2.6% (471, 000) of all in-patients (which totalled over 18 million in 2013-14). For outpatient care, the proportion treated by non-NHS providers has risen faster – from 0.2% (123,000) to 5.5% (4.5 million).

Orthopaedics (hip and knee replacements) tops the type of in-patient activity carried out by non-NHS providers, accounting for around one in eight episodes of care. If rates of growth since 2006-7 continue over the next 20 years, non-NHS providers could account for one in five of all outpatient attendances and approaching one in ten inpatient episodes paid for by the NHS.

Would this matter? Surely it is the quality of patient care and the efficiency with which it is delivered that counts?

A lot of people suffer from asthma, and an analysis of over 500 GP practices by Asthma UK suggests that over 22,000 of them have been prescribed medicines – long-acting reliever inhalers – in a way that is unsafe.

The report also shows that almost 100,000 asthmatics have been prescribed too many short-acting reliever inhalers (more than 12 in a year) without national clinical guidelines being followed.

Asthma medication is safe, but it is dangerous to use a long-acting reliever inhaler alone, without a steroid preventer inhaler or as a combination inhaler. This is because a long-acting reliever inhaler helps to keep the airways open but does not treat the underlying inflammation. This leaves the airways of people with asthma inflamed and more likely to react to triggers such as pollen or pollution, putting them at risk of having a potentially life-threatening attack.

If someone with asthma is prescribed more than 12 short acting reliever inhalers in a year (using it more than three times each week) it is a key indicator that they are not managing their condition and that their treatment needs reviewing.

If you are worried about your asthma inhalers, speak to one of our pharmacists and ask for a medicines use review.

Our Glaisyer & Kemp pharmacy in Hove was recently visited by a mystery patient to check the quality of our service. We are pleased to say we achieved a 8/10. Congratulations to all the staff who work day in, day out to maintain such a high quality of service.

The visit was conducted by The Pharmacist magazine and in summary, they reported:

“I received reassuring news about my eczema and honesty about not being able to be given stronger treatment over the counter. The pharmacist checked what I was currently taking before offering any more advice.”

Come pay us a visit!

Contact details and opening hours here: http://www.ackerschemists.com/glaisyer-kemp-pharmacy.php

Weighing yourself frequently and plotting your progress on a weight chart every day is an effective way to lose a modest amount of weight and, just as importantly, to keep it off, according to a recent study in the Journal of Obesity.

Standing on the bathroom scales regularly forces you to be aware of the link between your weight and what you eat, it appears, although the researchers found this method seems to work better for men than for women.

In the two year study, participants who lost weight in the first year were able to keep it off through the second year. This is significant because around 40% of weight lost through dieting is often put back on within a year, and within five years, all of it is regained.

As little as 5% weight loss has been shown to be clinically significant in overweight people, so keeping the weight off is worth working for.