'My job involves giving children a sense of control over their environment'

Rob Beadel is employed by Buckinghamshire county council to develop policies and train school staff in dealing with vulnerable children. Photograph: Alamy

Name: Dr Rob Beadel

Age: 53

Job: Senior educational psychologist

Council: Buckinghamshire county council

What is an educational psychologist? Educational psychologists advise local authorities in developing policies around education, carry out psychological assessments on children and train school staff in dealing with vulnerable children. We also have a role supporting families throughout Buckinghamshire..

Describe a typical day in your job: What I do is very interesting because it is so varied. It can involve seeing children, or working with local authority policy and practice at quite a senior level.

What kind of children do you work with? Children with no school place, or those with complex behavioural difficulties or significant mental health conditions. We also work with schools to produce materials for children who move home a lot, such as those whose parents are in the military. Military children who have lost a parent because of war or injury would be a priority group for us.

How do you help them? People have to adapt to new environments and psychology can help us understand what that means and how best to do that. That's why we developed "my passport" – a booklet that children take with them when they move schools. They can fill out information in it about themselves and their family, giving staff a better understanding of their background and history. The idea is to increase the child's sense of control over their environment so they settle in quicker.

What other interesting projects have you worked on? I've been talking to health professionals about the possible impact of returning veterans who have experienced trauma or post traumatic stress disorder and the possible impact that will have on their children.

What are the biggest challenges you face in your job? I work with some extremely vulnerable children and families, which makes demands on you personally. I think the variety of the job is an advantage – it makes it interesting – but it requires a very wide skill set. It's also keeping up to date with psychological literature; we are expected to do that. I have just finished a four year doctorate that I was doing concurrently with my job.

How do cuts and the changes to education the government is bringing in affect you? One of the ways we have reacted is to develop our services to make money. Schools that have been turned into academies have more control over their budgets and they can buy additional services from us now, such as training. So we've actually recruited additional psychologists who work in a different way.

How do you lead your team? We have 35 psychologists, some part-time some full-time, and it's very much a collaborative approach. The psychology of interaction is a crucial part of what I do, and giving advice to people isn't always the right thing to do. It is about working as part of a team as opposed to telling people what you think they ought to do.

What made you decide to be a psychologist? I was a teacher originally. I spent over 10 years working in a school with children with challenging behaviour and I became curious as to why they behaved the way they did and the best ways to help them. I decided to do a degree in psychology, and that led me to where I am now.

What made you decide to work in local government? The core of it for me is around public service ethos. Where I'm more comfortable is working with children and families who have the highest needs and who are the most vulnerable. And working for a local authority allows me to work in policy development as well at various levels.

What advice would you give to aspiring educational psychologists? Do a properly recognised psychology degree and get some experience working with children and young people and their families in whatever context. I think that's quite a good career route.

Who inspires you? Aneurin Bevan with the National Health Service – that ethos of helping other people but having organisations and structures that can do that.

• Want your say? Email sarah.marsh@theguardian.com to suggest contributions to the network.

Not already a member? Join us now for more comment, analysis and the latest job opportunities in local government.

View the original article here

Can foundation trusts survive and where do their loyalties lie?

A gap in areas lies between the governors and the non-executive directors of foundation trusts, writes David Walker. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

The polite word is 'hybrid'. The less polite is 'incoherent'. Either way, NHS foundation trusts are based on two contradictory visions of how they should operate and who should call the shots, and the 2012 Health Act is increasing the tension between them.

Ten years ago, Labour had a wacky idea. Instead of making primary care – the part of the NHS closest to people — more accountable, it would inject democracy into the providers of healthcare in the hospitals, ambulance, and mental health services. They, not the GPs, would have elections. The notion is now looking odder and odder, partly because of the competitive pressures stoked by the Cameron coalition's health act and partly because it's commissioning that needs accountability most.

No wonder, then, you start to overhear backstairs conversations asking whether the foundation trust (FT) model can survive. One half of the hybrid is the community, the people using the service, staff and patients themselves and it is they who elect FT governors. Alan Milburn, the Labour health secretary, dreamily talked of mutualism – but then set up a regulator, Monitor, to enforce strict business principles on FTs.

So the other half of the FT model is hardheaded commerce, profit and loss and earnings before interest, depreciation and amortisation. FTs are meant to behave like businesses, going for growth and profit. How are governors meant to square their desire for a local service with the FT board's concern to balance the books by closing a clinic here or a much-loved ward over there?

Democracy and profitability may be fated to war. Paul Hackett, director of the Smith Institute, notes 'all public institutions face tensions between representation and effectiveness', including school governing bodies and councils themselves. Smith, a centre-left thinktank, has just teamed up with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants to paint a picture of FT governance.

It's healthier than might have been thought, confirming surveys by Monitor. Total numbers involved have actually been growing though FT governors tend to be older and retired; half their elections are not contested. Still, many thousands of people, embedded in local areas across England (the experiment did not extend to the rest of the UK), contribute vast amounts of time and energy to their mental health, community and hospital services through membership of a trust.

The Smith report warns against generalisation – FTs vary widely in their levels of activism, and in how close governors get to board decision-making, especially in matters of finance. A yawning gap in many areas lies between the governors and the non-executive directors, who are not representative of the area but on the board to ensure trusts operate efficiently and effectively.

The Tories, embarrassed at the complete absence of accountability from their original ideas for clinical commissioning by GPs, inserted more powers for FT governors in the 2012 act; they now shadow many of the decisions taken by FT boards, without being paid and without the support apparatus boards tend to have.

Ahead lie problems. Governors are the public and want to operate in the open.

But how can FTs compete with private providers if their cost schedules and profit assumptions are declared in advance? Virgin of course has no governors. Its shareholders are institutional investors who play no part in executive decision taking unless profits go down. What if governors, responsive to staff and patients, opt for a lower rate of return than the board, mindful of competitive pressures? Who should have the last word?

If governors represent one area, what role should they play if an FT acquires healthcare responsibility in another area and the notion of 'local' gets stretched? In London, the executives of better-performing FTs are supposed to lend a hand to trusts in difficulty (most of them still in the notional pipeline to becoming FTs): governors might object to 'their' managers being distracted from serving the local area.

Do governors have any role in bidding for contracts from clinical commissioners? Or from councils? Now that public health has shifted to councils, some FTs are fighting for contracts from the town hall: is the local authority or the FT governing council more 'representative' of an area? The better FT governing councils are those that include elected councillors, but where now do their primary loyalties lie?

David Walker is a non-executive director of a foundation trust; the views expressed here are his own

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

Councils need to build on their successes in integrated health care

A new report assesses joined-up health and social care and local government's growing role in providing such services. Photograph: Shannon Fagan/Getty Images

Another week, and another report provides a reminder of how local government is changing. The report In Sickness and in Health from the independent thinktank Localis reflects the growing recognition of local government's role – working hand-in-hand with health commissioners, healthcare providers and local communities – in driving better health outcomes.

However, the report also recognises many of the difficulties faced by those responsible for making this work in practice. To understand the opportunities and the challenges involved, it is important to understand the broader context within which these changes are happening.

Well over a year since Barnet's "graph of doom", councils face a further round of budget cuts and council tax freezes. Meanwhile, as demands on local health and social services grow, so do questions about whether patients and service users are receiving the quality of care they deserve.

Not surprisingly, the mantra that only radical transformation will do has become the meme of public service reform, echoing around council chambers, conference halls and management boards. But talk to those at the frontline and there are few better places to start than the interfaces – or, perhaps more accurately, the gaps – around how care is delivered.

The concept of better co-ordinated services, centred on the needs of individuals, isn't new. The Local Government Association suggested that rolling out whole place community budgets could save between £9bn and £21bn over five years. The fund for joint NHS and local authority commissioning is set to be £3.8bn by 2015-16. And there is comfort in what one Localis researcher, Gwilym Tudor, Jones said earlier this year about the "near feverish excitement" around uniting health and social care services. But questions remain as to why it has taken so long already and what will happen next.

The story of health and social care in England is often written as one of crisis, but it's important to remember how much of this is driven by another story – one of success.

Between 2001-02 and 2011-12 net NHS expenditure increased from £49bn to £104bn.At the same time, gross expenditure on adult social care increased to £17bn, a 33% rise over the same period.

The benefit of bringing these services together is an area of almost complete political agreement. But the reality is that the closer we get to integration, the clearer both the opportunities and challenges become.

Take away considerations of politics and funding and we are still left with organisations with cultures, practices and infrastructure that are as separate as their objectives are shared.

Health and wellbeing boards will be crucial to fixing this, providing the one vital place where the right people come together with a view across the whole and the remit to make change.

This summer saw the launch of the Local Government Association's support for health and wellbeing boards seeking to integrate care at scale. Working with partners, including NHS England, Monitor, the Department of Health and Integrating Care, this is about providing practical help to identify opportunities, overcome barriers and implement the new models of working that promise the biggest improvements for service users and organisations alike.

At the heart of the association's work is the recognition that many local authorities and their partners have already made good progress in bringing together services. Learning from what has been achieved, and making it the norm, is our best chance of meeting the challenges ahead.

Simon Morioka is managing director at PPL and senior adviser at Integrating Care.

• What do you think? Email sarah.marsh@theguardian.com if you want to contribute an article to this debate.

Not already a member? Join us now for more comment, analysis and the latest job opportunities in local government.

View the original article here

New doctors need more support as they begin their careers, survey finds

Almost three quarters (73%) of junior doctors say they do not have enough time to give patients the care they require. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Over the coming weeks about 6,000 new junior doctors will start life on the wards. It is a tough and daunting experience, as they put into practice all the training they have received over the past four or five years.

Predictably, there is negative press coverage around this time, based on research from the Dr Foster unit and the department of acute medicine at Imperial College London. The article, published four years ago, did show a small increase in deaths at the start of August – but the findings did not demonstrate a causal link between the rise in mortalities and the influx of new doctors.

Since that research was first published, junior doctors have become better prepared for the transition from medical student to junior doctor: training is far more patient-focused at medical school, and there is a period of pre-job shadowing, dedicated induction programmes and close clinical supervision. But there is no doubt that this is a challenging time for both junior doctors and senior colleagues.

We conducted a survey of about 350 junior doctors who are just completing their first year on the hospital wards, which produced some interesting findings. It was encouraging to see that more than two thirds had chosen a career to help people, but disheartening that a third were re-considering their career choice due to their early experiences. After years of dedicated study, it is a telling sign of the major stresses placed on the shoulders of young doctors so early in their careers.

We must do more to support junior doctors. Though the profession clearly has a role to play, so too do NHS managers. They have the power to provide appropriate resourcing and support on the ward, which can affect morale. As our survey shows, three quarters of respondents said that they had struggled with long hours. A similar number had difficulty with heavy workloads, and more than a third had felt isolated.

When asked what they had found most challenging when dealing with patients during their first year, 73% of junior doctors said they didn't have enough time to give patients the care they required, and nearly half were working beyond the maximum working hours stipulated by European law.

Managers have an important role in providing a safe learning environment. They should be accessible, and receptive to concerns, queries and new ideas. They will have a pivotal role in delivering Sir Bruce Keogh's vision, set out in his recent review into the quality of care and treatment provided by 14 hospital trusts in England.

I share his belief that junior doctors should not just be seen as the clinical leaders of tomorrow, but the clinical leaders of today. We must harness their enthusiasm and support them to become a valuable and respected member of the team.

Junior doctors are at the frontline of patient care, they understand the challenges faced by both patient and management and are, therefore, a valuable source of intelligence. They are capable of providing real insights and seeing things that affect patient safety.

The NHS has come under sustained fire and we need to nurture it back to health. Junior doctors represent the present and our future, and have a core role in restoring pride in our healthcare system, which we often forget is the envy of many countries.

So spare a thought for the thousands of young doctors who have embarked on a lifetime of dedicated hard work and study, and whose actions are a matter of life and death.

Dr Pallavi Bradshaw is medicolegal adviser at the Medical Protection Society.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

NHS trusts are not getting the most out of their MRI scanners

MRI scanners should be used seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. Photograph: Mark Kostich/Getty Images

Extending the range of hospital services provided at weekends is becoming an increasingly important health policy. Having identified this as a priority, NHS England medical director Bruce Keogh has set up a forum focusing on creating a seven-days-a-week NHS, with its findings due to be published later this year. This review comes after a welter of professional advice, and studies in recent years have identified that patients admitted to hospital at weekends have significantly worse outcomes than those admitted during the week.

In 2011, a Royal College of Surgeons study into emergency surgical patients and the Dr Foster Hospital Guide both highlighted how the closure of services at weekends was a significant factor in patient outcomes. A lack of routine diagnostic services was specifically highlighted as having an adverse effect, creating a bottleneck for getting patients to effective treatment.

Currently in some trusts, scanning services are still run as a weekday limited-hours service, and the implication of this is that capacity is not keeping pace with demand. Alliance Medical's research and analysis of available data across the NHS shows that more than a quarter of NHS trusts (37 of 135) have a very low utilisation rate of below 5,000 MRI scans per machine per year. By contrast, across the 20 NHS static imaging centres run by Alliance Medical, 14 operate seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. On sites with high throughput, these are staffed at two radiographers per scanning hour to maximise patient throughput. The services are integrated with being able to offer clinical reporting services, which can provide access to clinicians in the UK and other time zones for urgent reports.

With volumes of MRI scans increasing by around 10% a year, there is a strong financial case for extending hours and improving productivity through the most efficient utilisation of scanning services.

There is nothing revolutionary in achieving this and trusts should look at extending hours in scanning as an "easy win" towards the achievement of a seven-days-a-week NHS.

Flexible staff contracts that routinely consider scanning as a seven-day service are fundamental, and this is an area where the Agenda for Change may have inadvertently created disincentives for some trusts. The rates of unsociable hours salary premiums, as well as the difficulty of dovetailing with consultant and junior doctor job planning, can mean a sharp escalation in staff costs. But, with demand for scans rising, ensuring full utilisation of the established units has to be a more efficient option than simply setting up new scanning centres, each running below capacity.

This is an area where independent healthcare providers such as Alliance Medical have a distinct advantage because their staff contracts assume a routine operation across a seven-day rota with standardised working hours.

Absolutely key to the productivity of radiographers is the team of administrative staff that supports them. A good support team manages the back-office tasks, freeing radiographers to deliver frontline patient care, and works to maximise utilisation by proactively filling appointment slots.

Good performance data and support systems also play an important role in the management of diagnostic lists and are currently lacking in many areas. Through its partnering arrangements with the NHS, Alliance Medical measures patient throughput and has introduced key performance indicators, including hours of uptime and patients scanned per hour. These are measured and reported daily right up to board level. By sharing knowledge in this way, workflows can be standardised, minimising duplication of effort and data entry to ensure a consistently high level of patient care and throughput. Systematically reviewing capacity versus demand enables staffing to be balanced to mirror the hospital's wider needs. 

Another important factor is negotiating hard on maintenance and service contracts. Alliance Medical negotiates for routine maintenance work to be undertaken out-of-hours (which, under seven-day working, means overnight) and as a result they have MRI scanners operating at 99.42% of opening hours.

Improving access to scanning services makes sense both financially and in terms of meeting the expectations that will be placed on providers over the coming year. It entails a relatively simple set of processes and should be one of the first areas looked at by acute trusts.

David Loasby a former NHS acute trust chief executive and UK business development director for Alliance Medical Limited.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

NHS trusts are not getting the most out of their MRI scanners

MRI scanners should be used seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. Photograph: Mark Kostich/Getty Images

Extending the range of hospital services provided at weekends is becoming an increasingly important health policy. Having identified this as a priority, NHS England medical director Bruce Keogh has set up a forum focusing on creating a seven-days-a-week NHS, with its findings due to be published later this year. This review comes after a welter of professional advice, and studies in recent years have identified that patients admitted to hospital at weekends have significantly worse outcomes than those admitted during the week.

In 2011, a Royal College of Surgeons study into emergency surgical patients and the Dr Foster Hospital Guide both highlighted how the closure of services at weekends was a significant factor in patient outcomes. A lack of routine diagnostic services was specifically highlighted as having an adverse effect, creating a bottleneck for getting patients to effective treatment.

Currently in some trusts, scanning services are still run as a weekday limited-hours service, and the implication of this is that capacity is not keeping pace with demand. Alliance Medical's research and analysis of available data across the NHS shows that more than a quarter of NHS trusts (37 of 135) have a very low utilisation rate of below 5,000 MRI scans per machine per year. By contrast, across the 20 NHS static imaging centres run by Alliance Medical, 14 operate seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. On sites with high throughput, these are staffed at two radiographers per scanning hour to maximise patient throughput. The services are integrated with being able to offer clinical reporting services, which can provide access to clinicians in the UK and other time zones for urgent reports.

With volumes of MRI scans increasing by around 10% a year, there is a strong financial case for extending hours and improving productivity through the most efficient utilisation of scanning services.

There is nothing revolutionary in achieving this and trusts should look at extending hours in scanning as an "easy win" towards the achievement of a seven-days-a-week NHS.

Flexible staff contracts that routinely consider scanning as a seven-day service are fundamental, and this is an area where the Agenda for Change may have inadvertently created disincentives for some trusts. The rates of unsociable hours salary premiums, as well as the difficulty of dovetailing with consultant and junior doctor job planning, can mean a sharp escalation in staff costs. But, with demand for scans rising, ensuring full utilisation of the established units has to be a more efficient option than simply setting up new scanning centres, each running below capacity.

This is an area where independent healthcare providers such as Alliance Medical have a distinct advantage because their staff contracts assume a routine operation across a seven-day rota with standardised working hours.

Absolutely key to the productivity of radiographers is the team of administrative staff that supports them. A good support team manages the back-office tasks, freeing radiographers to deliver frontline patient care, and works to maximise utilisation by proactively filling appointment slots.

Good performance data and support systems also play an important role in the management of diagnostic lists and are currently lacking in many areas. Through its partnering arrangements with the NHS, Alliance Medical measures patient throughput and has introduced key performance indicators, including hours of uptime and patients scanned per hour. These are measured and reported daily right up to board level. By sharing knowledge in this way, workflows can be standardised, minimising duplication of effort and data entry to ensure a consistently high level of patient care and throughput. Systematically reviewing capacity versus demand enables staffing to be balanced to mirror the hospital's wider needs. 

Another important factor is negotiating hard on maintenance and service contracts. Alliance Medical negotiates for routine maintenance work to be undertaken out-of-hours (which, under seven-day working, means overnight) and as a result they have MRI scanners operating at 99.42% of opening hours.

Improving access to scanning services makes sense both financially and in terms of meeting the expectations that will be placed on providers over the coming year. It entails a relatively simple set of processes and should be one of the first areas looked at by acute trusts.

David Loasby a former NHS acute trust chief executive and UK business development director for Alliance Medical Limited.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

New doctors need more support as they begin their careers, survey finds

Almost three quarters (73%) of junior doctors say they do not have enough time to give patients the care they require. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Over the coming weeks about 6,000 new junior doctors will start life on the wards. It is a tough and daunting experience, as they put into practice all the training they have received over the past four or five years.

Predictably, there is negative press coverage around this time, based on research from the Dr Foster unit and the department of acute medicine at Imperial College London. The article, published four years ago, did show a small increase in deaths at the start of August – but the findings did not demonstrate a causal link between the rise in mortalities and the influx of new doctors.

Since that research was first published, junior doctors have become better prepared for the transition from medical student to junior doctor: training is far more patient-focused at medical school, and there is a period of pre-job shadowing, dedicated induction programmes and close clinical supervision. But there is no doubt that this is a challenging time for both junior doctors and senior colleagues.

We conducted a survey of about 350 junior doctors who are just completing their first year on the hospital wards, which produced some interesting findings. It was encouraging to see that more than two thirds had chosen a career to help people, but disheartening that a third were re-considering their career choice due to their early experiences. After years of dedicated study, it is a telling sign of the major stresses placed on the shoulders of young doctors so early in their careers.

We must do more to support junior doctors. Though the profession clearly has a role to play, so too do NHS managers. They have the power to provide appropriate resourcing and support on the ward, which can affect morale. As our survey shows, three quarters of respondents said that they had struggled with long hours. A similar number had difficulty with heavy workloads, and more than a third had felt isolated.

When asked what they had found most challenging when dealing with patients during their first year, 73% of junior doctors said they didn't have enough time to give patients the care they required, and nearly half were working beyond the maximum working hours stipulated by European law.

Managers have an important role in providing a safe learning environment. They should be accessible, and receptive to concerns, queries and new ideas. They will have a pivotal role in delivering Sir Bruce Keogh's vision, set out in his recent review into the quality of care and treatment provided by 14 hospital trusts in England.

I share his belief that junior doctors should not just be seen as the clinical leaders of tomorrow, but the clinical leaders of today. We must harness their enthusiasm and support them to become a valuable and respected member of the team.

Junior doctors are at the frontline of patient care, they understand the challenges faced by both patient and management and are, therefore, a valuable source of intelligence. They are capable of providing real insights and seeing things that affect patient safety.

The NHS has come under sustained fire and we need to nurture it back to health. Junior doctors represent the present and our future, and have a core role in restoring pride in our healthcare system, which we often forget is the envy of many countries.

So spare a thought for the thousands of young doctors who have embarked on a lifetime of dedicated hard work and study, and whose actions are a matter of life and death.

Dr Pallavi Bradshaw is medicolegal adviser at the Medical Protection Society.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

NHS trusts are not getting the most out of their MRI scanners

MRI scanners should be used seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. Photograph: Mark Kostich/Getty Images

Extending the range of hospital services provided at weekends is becoming an increasingly important health policy. Having identified this as a priority, NHS England medical director Bruce Keogh has set up a forum focusing on creating a seven-days-a-week NHS, with its findings due to be published later this year. This review comes after a welter of professional advice, and studies in recent years have identified that patients admitted to hospital at weekends have significantly worse outcomes than those admitted during the week.

In 2011, a Royal College of Surgeons study into emergency surgical patients and the Dr Foster Hospital Guide both highlighted how the closure of services at weekends was a significant factor in patient outcomes. A lack of routine diagnostic services was specifically highlighted as having an adverse effect, creating a bottleneck for getting patients to effective treatment.

Currently in some trusts, scanning services are still run as a weekday limited-hours service, and the implication of this is that capacity is not keeping pace with demand. Alliance Medical's research and analysis of available data across the NHS shows that more than a quarter of NHS trusts (37 of 135) have a very low utilisation rate of below 5,000 MRI scans per machine per year. By contrast, across the 20 NHS static imaging centres run by Alliance Medical, 14 operate seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. On sites with high throughput, these are staffed at two radiographers per scanning hour to maximise patient throughput. The services are integrated with being able to offer clinical reporting services, which can provide access to clinicians in the UK and other time zones for urgent reports.

With volumes of MRI scans increasing by around 10% a year, there is a strong financial case for extending hours and improving productivity through the most efficient utilisation of scanning services.

There is nothing revolutionary in achieving this and trusts should look at extending hours in scanning as an "easy win" towards the achievement of a seven-days-a-week NHS.

Flexible staff contracts that routinely consider scanning as a seven-day service are fundamental, and this is an area where the Agenda for Change may have inadvertently created disincentives for some trusts. The rates of unsociable hours salary premiums, as well as the difficulty of dovetailing with consultant and junior doctor job planning, can mean a sharp escalation in staff costs. But, with demand for scans rising, ensuring full utilisation of the established units has to be a more efficient option than simply setting up new scanning centres, each running below capacity.

This is an area where independent healthcare providers such as Alliance Medical have a distinct advantage because their staff contracts assume a routine operation across a seven-day rota with standardised working hours.

Absolutely key to the productivity of radiographers is the team of administrative staff that supports them. A good support team manages the back-office tasks, freeing radiographers to deliver frontline patient care, and works to maximise utilisation by proactively filling appointment slots.

Good performance data and support systems also play an important role in the management of diagnostic lists and are currently lacking in many areas. Through its partnering arrangements with the NHS, Alliance Medical measures patient throughput and has introduced key performance indicators, including hours of uptime and patients scanned per hour. These are measured and reported daily right up to board level. By sharing knowledge in this way, workflows can be standardised, minimising duplication of effort and data entry to ensure a consistently high level of patient care and throughput. Systematically reviewing capacity versus demand enables staffing to be balanced to mirror the hospital's wider needs. 

Another important factor is negotiating hard on maintenance and service contracts. Alliance Medical negotiates for routine maintenance work to be undertaken out-of-hours (which, under seven-day working, means overnight) and as a result they have MRI scanners operating at 99.42% of opening hours.

Improving access to scanning services makes sense both financially and in terms of meeting the expectations that will be placed on providers over the coming year. It entails a relatively simple set of processes and should be one of the first areas looked at by acute trusts.

David Loasby a former NHS acute trust chief executive and UK business development director for Alliance Medical Limited.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

New doctors need more support as they begin their careers, survey finds

Almost three quarters (73%) of junior doctors say they do not have enough time to give patients the care they require. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Over the coming weeks about 6,000 new junior doctors will start life on the wards. It is a tough and daunting experience, as they put into practice all the training they have received over the past four or five years.

Predictably, there is negative press coverage around this time, based on research from the Dr Foster unit and the department of acute medicine at Imperial College London. The article, published four years ago, did show a small increase in deaths at the start of August – but the findings did not demonstrate a causal link between the rise in mortalities and the influx of new doctors.

Since that research was first published, junior doctors have become better prepared for the transition from medical student to junior doctor: training is far more patient-focused at medical school, and there is a period of pre-job shadowing, dedicated induction programmes and close clinical supervision. But there is no doubt that this is a challenging time for both junior doctors and senior colleagues.

We conducted a survey of about 350 junior doctors who are just completing their first year on the hospital wards, which produced some interesting findings. It was encouraging to see that more than two thirds had chosen a career to help people, but disheartening that a third were re-considering their career choice due to their early experiences. After years of dedicated study, it is a telling sign of the major stresses placed on the shoulders of young doctors so early in their careers.

We must do more to support junior doctors. Though the profession clearly has a role to play, so too do NHS managers. They have the power to provide appropriate resourcing and support on the ward, which can affect morale. As our survey shows, three quarters of respondents said that they had struggled with long hours. A similar number had difficulty with heavy workloads, and more than a third had felt isolated.

When asked what they had found most challenging when dealing with patients during their first year, 73% of junior doctors said they didn't have enough time to give patients the care they required, and nearly half were working beyond the maximum working hours stipulated by European law.

Managers have an important role in providing a safe learning environment. They should be accessible, and receptive to concerns, queries and new ideas. They will have a pivotal role in delivering Sir Bruce Keogh's vision, set out in his recent review into the quality of care and treatment provided by 14 hospital trusts in England.

I share his belief that junior doctors should not just be seen as the clinical leaders of tomorrow, but the clinical leaders of today. We must harness their enthusiasm and support them to become a valuable and respected member of the team.

Junior doctors are at the frontline of patient care, they understand the challenges faced by both patient and management and are, therefore, a valuable source of intelligence. They are capable of providing real insights and seeing things that affect patient safety.

The NHS has come under sustained fire and we need to nurture it back to health. Junior doctors represent the present and our future, and have a core role in restoring pride in our healthcare system, which we often forget is the envy of many countries.

So spare a thought for the thousands of young doctors who have embarked on a lifetime of dedicated hard work and study, and whose actions are a matter of life and death.

Dr Pallavi Bradshaw is medicolegal adviser at the Medical Protection Society.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.

View the original article here

As many as 1 in 5 women don't believe their breast cancer risk

Main Category: Breast Cancer
Also Included In: Genetics;  Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 19 Aug 2013 - 1:00 PDT
Current ratings for:
As many as 1 in 5 women don't believe their breast cancer risk

Despite taking a tailored risk assessment tool that factors in family history and personal habits, nearly 20 percent of women did not believe their breast cancer risk, according to a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Most of the women who didn't believe their risk numbers said they did not feel it took into account their family history of cancer or their personal health habits. The tool did ask relevant questions about the individual's family and personal history.

"If people don't believe their risk numbers, it does not allow them to make informed medical decisions," says senior study author Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and a research scientist at the VA Ann Arbor Center for Clinical Management Research.

"Women who believe their risk is not high might skip chemoprevention strategies that could significantly reduce their risk. And women who think their risk should be higher could potentially undergo treatments that might not be medically appropriate, which can have long-term ramifications," she adds

The findings, published in Patient Education and Counseling, are part of a larger study looking at how to improve patients' understanding of risk information.

Some 690 women who were at above-average risk of developing breast cancer completed a web-based decision aid that included questions about age, ethnicity, personal history of breast cancer, and number of first-degree relatives who had had breast cancer. The women then were told their five-year risk of developing breast cancer and given information about prevention strategies.

After receiving this information, the women were asked to recall their risk of breast cancer within the next five years. If they answered incorrectly, they were asked why: they forgot, made a rounding error or disagreed with the number. The researchers found that 22 percent of women who misreported their risk said they disagreed with the numbers.

The most common reason women said they disagreed with their risk was that their family history made them either more or less likely to develop breast cancer. Many believed that because an aunt or father had cancer, it increased their risk. Only first-degree female relatives - mother, sister, daughter - impact a person's breast cancer risk. Others felt a lack of family history meant their cancer risk should be very low.

One-third of women cited a gut instinct that their risk numbers just seemed too high or too low.

"We've put so much fear in people about breast cancer so they feel at high risk," says lead study author Laura D. Scherer, Ph.D. "We found that many women assumed certain factors should impact their risk, like cancer history in distant or male relatives, but those factors don't put a woman at increased risk.

"We have a trend toward personalized medicine and individualized medicine, but if people don't believe their personalized risk numbers, they're not going to get the best medical care for them," says Scherer, who is now at the University of Missouri. She completed the research while at the University of Michigan.

Breast cancer statistics: 234,580 Americans will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and 40,030 will die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our breast cancer section for the latest news on this subject.

Belief in numbers: When and why women disbelieve tailored breast cancer risk statistics, doi:10.1016/j.pec.2013.03.016

Additional authors: Peter A. Ubel, Duke University; Jennifer McClure, Group Health Research Institute; Sharon Hensley Alford, Henry Ford Health System; Lisa Holtzman, University of Michigan; Nicole Exe, University of Michigan

Patient Education and Counseling, Vol. 92, No. 2, pp. 253-259, August 2013

University of Michigan Health System

Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

MLA

University of Michigan Health System. "As many as 1 in 5 women don't believe their breast cancer risk." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 19 Aug. 2013. Web.
19 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'As many as 1 in 5 women don't believe their breast cancer risk'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

View the original article here

Good news for people who lose their foveal vision due to macular diseases

Main Category: Eye Health / Blindness
Also Included In: Seniors / Aging
Article Date: 19 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Good news for people who lose their foveal vision due to macular diseases

When something gets in the way of our ability to see, we quickly pick up a new way to look, in much the same way that we would learn to ride a bike, according to a new study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.

Our eyes are constantly on the move, darting this way and that four to five times per second. Now researchers have found that the precise manner of those eye movements can change within a matter of hours. This discovery by researchers from the University of Southern California might suggest a way to help those with macular degeneration better cope with vision loss.

"The system that controls how the eyes move is far more malleable than the literature has suggested," says Bosco Tjan of the University of Southern California. "We showed that people with normal vision can quickly adjust to a temporary occlusion of their foveal vision by adapting a consistent point in their peripheral vision as their new point of gaze."

The fovea refers to the small, center-most portion of the retina, which is responsible for our high-resolution vision. We move our eyes to direct the fovea to different parts of a scene, constructing a picture of the world around us. In those with age-related macular degeneration, progressive loss of foveal vision leads to visual impairment and blindness.

In the new study, MiYoung Kwon, Anirvan Nandy, and Tjan simulated a loss of foveal vision in six normally sighted young adults by blocking part of a visual scene with a gray disc that followed the individuals' eye gaze. Those individuals were then asked to complete demanding object-following and visual-search tasks. Within three hours of working on those tasks, people showed a remarkably fast and spontaneous adjustment of eye movements. Once developed, that change in their "point of gaze" was retained over a period of weeks and was reengaged whenever their foveal vision was blocked.

Tjan and his team say they were surprised by the rate of this adjustment. They note that patients with macular degeneration frequently do adapt their point of gaze, but in a process that takes months, not days or hours. They suggest that practice with a visible gray disc like the one used in the study might help speed that process of visual rehabilitation along. The discovery also reveals that the oculomotor (eye movement) system prefers control simplicity over optimality.

"Gaze control by the oculomotor system, although highly automatic, is malleable in the same sense that motor control of the limbs is malleable," Tjan says. "This finding is potentially very good news for people who lose their foveal vision due to macular diseases. It may be possible to create the right conditions for the oculomotor system to quickly adjust," Kwon adds.

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our eye health / blindness section for the latest news on this subject. Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

MLA

Press, Cell. "Good news for people who lose their foveal vision due to macular diseases." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 19 Aug. 2013. Web.
19 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'Good news for people who lose their foveal vision due to macular diseases'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

View the original article here

Where in the body immune cells reach maturity is important for their later function

Main Category: Immune System / Vaccines
Article Date: 16 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Where in the body immune cells reach maturity is important for their later function

Regulatory T cells (or "Tregs" for short) play a central role in the human immune system: They guide all of the other immune cells and make sure they are tolerant of the body's own cells and harmless foreign substances. How Tregs become Tregs in the first place has been only incompletely understood - until now. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany, along with their colleagues at the Hannover Medical School (MHH) have recently gleaned important new insights into the workings of these cells. As it turns out, origin is key - greater numbers of Tregs are produced within certain lymph nodes than in others. The researchers are now publishing their insights in the scientific journal Mucosal Immunology.

Without regulatory T cells, the human defence system would not work properly. Defender cells would be fiercely fighting off even harmless foreign substances like the parts of certain kinds of food, for example, as the immune system would simply not be "tolerant" towards these harmless substances. This tolerance is mediated through the Tregs - they are "tolerogenic."

They instruct other immune cells as to which intruders really do need to be fought off and which ones do not pose a threat. However, even regulatory T cells have to first acquire this unique skill. What we have known for some time now is that they receive their "training" inside lymph nodes. "Lymph nodes are basically the immune system's meeting points if you will," says Prof. Jochen Hühn, Head of Experimental Immunology at the HZI. "Here, different types of immune cells meet up and also encounter antigen." An antigen is a structure the immune system is able to recognize like component parts of pathogens or foods.

The researchers compared the development of murine T cells obtained from lymph nodes from various locations in the body, like the liver, intestine, and skin. In the process, they learned that more Tregs capable of teaching other cells to be tolerant of food antigens are made inside lymph nodes of the liver and intestine - a property the lymph nodes maintained even when they were transplanted to the skin. Conversely, skin lymph nodes did not become more tolerogenic if transplanted to the intestine. The HZI scientists made these discoveries together with their colleagues from Prof. Oliver Papst's team at the MHH Institute of Immunology.

Based on their observations, the scientists deduced that lymph node location influences the maturation process of the cells they contain. "The cells retained their original skills for weeks following the transplant," says Dr. Sascha Cording, one of the study's first authors. "You might say lymph nodes have something like a location-specific memory."

And this in spite of the fact that all the various types of blood cells within a lymph node, including the immune cells, are constantly replaced, which means the lymph nodes' location memory must be encoded somewhere in its stroma.

Additional experiments allowed the scientists to probe just how lymph nodes obtain their memory: Following birth, both the supply of vitamin A and the intestinal bacterial microflora figure prominently into this process. Without these two influencing factors, the lymph nodes simply forget about their origin and lose their tolerogenic properties.

These findings about lymph node imprinting apply to humans as well: An inadequate supply of vitamin A after birth or meddling with the baby's developing microflora through administration of antibiotics can interfere with the lymph nodes' long-term memory. "At what age this process happens in humans we cannot as of yet pinpoint with any certainty," says Hühn. "Whether we're talking about the first few days, weeks, or months even, is difficult to surmise." The next step will be identifying the potential repercussions interfering with early imprinting of the immune system. Down the line, things like food allergies or autoimmune diseases might be the result.

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our immune system / vaccines section for the latest news on this subject.

The intestinal micro-environment imprints stromal cells to promote efficient Treg induction in gut-draining lymph nodes

Sascha Cording, Benjamin Wahl, Devesha Kulkarni, Himprya Chopra, Jörn Pezoldt, Manuela Buettner, Annegret Dummer, Usri Hadis, Markus Heimesaat, Stefan Bereswill, Christine Falk, Ulrike Bode, Alf Hamann, Diana Fleissner, Jochen Huehn, Oliver Pabst

Mucosal Immunology, 2013, DOI: 10.1038/mi.2013.54

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research

Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

MLA

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. "Where in the body immune cells reach maturity is important for their later function." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 16 Aug. 2013. Web.
16 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'Where in the body immune cells reach maturity is important for their later function'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

View the original article here

With a little help from their Virtual friend, older Latino adults get more exercise

Main Category: Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness
Also Included In: Seniors / Aging;  Arthritis / Rheumatology;  Hypertension
Article Date: 16 Aug 2013 - 1:00 PDT Current ratings for:
With a little help from their Virtual friend, older Latino adults get more exercise

When it comes to getting motivated to exercise and do things that are good for our health, sometimes all it takes is a little help from our friends.

This was certainly the case for a group of older, Latino adults in Northern California: They benefited from the advice and encouragement of a virtual friend - a physical-activity adviser named Carmen, a new study reports.

Individuals who participated in an exercise program guided by the virtual adviser had an eight-fold increase in walking compared with those who did not, according to the study, published online today in the Journal of Health Communication. Led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, it is believed to be among the first "e-health" studies geared toward a non-English speaking, older-adult population with low literacy.

"The results indicate that a virtual adviser delivering culturally and linguistically adapted physical activity advice led to meaningful four-month increases in walking relative to control among underserved older adults," the study says. "This interactive technology, which requires minimal language and computer literacy, may help reduce health disparities by ensuring that all groups benefit from 'e-health' opportunities."

The lead author of the study is Abby King, PhD, professor of health research and policy and of medicine, and director of the Healthy Aging Research & Technology Solutions laboratory at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

Electronic games and programs that promote healthy habits have proliferated in recent years. King studies the effectiveness of those specifically targeted toward older adults and said she believes older adults represent the perfect population for such interventions. "[They] are at particular risk for the chronic diseases that can be positively influenced by reasonably modest improvements in physical activity," she and her co-authors write in the paper.

This study was based on an earlier study of a successful two-month, physical activity intervention geared toward older, primarily low-income African-Americans. The earlier study, led by Timothy Bickmore, PhD, associate professor at Northeastern University, involved the use of an interactive computer character that simulated face-to-face counseling; participants interacted with the adviser by touching responses shown on the computer screen.

The new study, of which Bickmore is a co-author, targeted another underserved (and often inactive) population: low-income, older, Latino adults. The digital adviser was modified to fit in with local Latino culture and to offer interactions in English or Spanish.

For the trial, King and her colleagues recruited 40 inactive adults, ages 55 and older, from a primarily Latino population in San Jose, Calif. More than 92.5 percent self-identified as Latino, and 81 percent reported an annual household income of less than $50,000. The great majority (92 percent) reported a history of chronic illnesses, with the most common being high blood pressure, high cholesterol and arthritis.

Study participants were randomly assigned to a four-month walking intervention, coached by Carmen the virtual adviser, or to a control group. Those in the intervention program were taught to use a pedometer to track their daily steps. During weekly sessions, Carmen evaluated their pedometer information to provide them with personalized feedback, problem-solving and goal-setting. Participants were encouraged to interact weekly with Carmen, who was made available to them through a computer at a local senior center.

The researchers looked at the change in walking behavior at two months and four months, and also assessed whether the participants were adopting any strategies taught by Carmen. After four months, the researchers found that participants increased the amount of time they walked by an average of about 253 minutes each week - eight times more than the increase in the control group.

The investigators also found that five motivational behavior-change strategies significantly increased over four months for those in the intervention program. These included "understanding the risks of inactivity, committing oneself to being physically active, substituting more active alternatives, rewarding oneself for being physically active and reminding oneself to be physically active," the study said. These skills, it noted, "have been associated with positive health behavior change in other populations."

"While we hoped that the culturally tailored, individualized program would appeal to older Latino adults, we were surprised and gratified to see how well the group of participants randomized to receive Carmen-based counseling actually did," King said.

King also said she was heartened that so many participants requested access to Carmen after the data-collection period of the study was over. The researchers left the computer program at the senior center for an additional 20 weeks, and all but one of the participants assigned to the intervention interacted with Carmen during that time.

The study enrollment was small, but the researchers are encouraged by the results. "We believe that, with some additional development and larger-scale testing, these types of virtual adviser programs have the potential for wide adoption and dissemination throughout other communities," King said, adding that the virtual adviser could be modified based on the ethnicity of other targeted groups.

King and Bickmore were recently awarded a National Institutes of Health grant to conduct a larger, randomized trial of the program. They plan to assess Carmen's effectiveness as a personal adviser over a longer time period and identify who might benefit the most from using this type of support. The plan is to deploy Carmen at numerous community centers across the San Francisco Bay Area.

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our obesity / weight loss / fitness section for the latest news on this subject.

Other Stanford co-authors of the paper include research assistant Maria Ines Campero and Leslie Pruitt, PhD, who was a senior research scientist at the time the study was conducted.

The study was supported by a Public Health Service grant (R21CA127511) from the National Cancer Institute. Information about Stanford's Department of Health Research and Policy and the Department of Medicine, both of which also supported the research, is available at http://medicine.stanford.edu/.

Stanford University Medical Center

Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

MLA

Stanford University Medical Center. "With a little help from their Virtual friend, older Latino adults get more exercise." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 16 Aug. 2013. Web.
16 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'With a little help from their Virtual friend, older Latino adults get more exercise'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

View the original article here

Care may be improved for LGBT's by recording sexual orientation and gender identity in their medical records

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Also Included In: Primary Care / General Practice;  IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 15 Aug 2013 - 1:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Care may be improved for LGBT's by recording sexual orientation and gender identity in their medical records

Recording the sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) of individuals in their health records would greatly facilitate identifying the unique health needs and health disparities of LGBT individuals, leading to improved quality and outcomes of their health care. The advantages of reporting this information and the growing support for including it in electronic health records (EHRs) are described in an article in LGBT Health, a new peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, launching in fall 2013. The article is available free on the website.

Sean Cahill, PhD and Harvey J. Makadon, MD, The Fenway Institute (Boston, MA), emphasize the need for more data and research on LGBT health and health disparities, as noted in a 2011 Institute of Medicine report that recommended routine collection of SOGI information and its inclusion in EHRs. Ready access to this information could facilitate conversations between clinicians and patients about risk factors and targeted preventive measures. Cahill teaches public policy at New York University (New York, NY) and Makadon is Clinical Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA).

In the article "Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data Collection in Clinical Settings and in Electronic Health Records: A Key to Ending LGBT Health Disparities" * the authors describe overwhelming support for routine collection of SOGI information among LGBT advocacy groups and HIV/AIDS organizations, as well as the support for SOGI data collection in the Healthy People 2020 initiative, and the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act.

"The Obama Administration has taken significant strides toward increasing LGBT data collection on health surveys," said Cahill. "Right now the federal government is considering whether to include SOGI as standard demographic questions in Stage 3 meaningful use guidelines, which set the standard for data collection in EHRs. We believe that including SOGI measures in these guidelines would dramatically increase our understanding of LGBT health disparities and our ability to address them."

"While there is no question about the benefits of collecting such data, some concern has been raised about the security of the EHR and potential misuses," says Editor-in-Chief, William Byne, MD, PhD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY. "In addition to addressing how to best elicit the data, Cahill and Makadon also address such implementation concerns."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our psychology / psychiatry section for the latest news on this subject. Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

MLA

Liebert, Mary Ann. "Care may be improved for LGBT's by recording sexual orientation and gender identity in their medical records." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 15 Aug. 2013. Web.
15 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'Care may be improved for LGBT's by recording sexual orientation and gender identity in their medical records'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

View the original article here

Those who often recall their dreams respond more strongly to their name

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 15 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Those who often recall their dreams respond more strongly to their name

Dreaming remains one of the great mysteries of human cognition. It is still not fully known when dreams occur, and which mechanisms in the brain produce them. A major difficulty for studying dreams is that they leave only a fleeting memory upon awakening.

Perrine Ruby and colleagues from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center chose a new approach to investigate dreaming. They recorded brain activity of two groups of participants: high dream recallers who recall dreams nearly every day and low dream recallers who recall a dream once or twice a month. Brain activity (electroencephalogram) was recorded while they were hearing first names before and during sleep.

From the analysis of oscillatory brain signals, high and low dream recallers were found to differentially process first names during wakefulness, suggesting different functional organization of the brain in the two groups. Moreover, high dream recallers showed more intra-sleep wakefulness than low dream recallers.

Together with previous findings, these results suggest a greater brain reactivity in high than in low dream recallers which would facilitate awakenings during sleep and therefore dream memorisation

Article title: Alpha reactivity to first names differs in subjects with high and low dream recall frequency

Journal: Frontiers in Psychology; DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00419 Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our psychology / psychiatry section for the latest news on this subject. Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

MLA

Frontiers. "Those who often recall their dreams respond more strongly to their name." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 15 Aug. 2013. Web.
15 Aug. 2013. APA

Please note: If no author information is provided, the source is cited instead.

'Those who often recall their dreams respond more strongly to their name'

Please note that we publish your name, but we do not publish your email address. It is only used to let you know when your message is published. We do not use it for any other purpose. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.

All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.

Contact Our News Editors

For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.

Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:

Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.

View the original article here