The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence have launched a mobile app for iPhone and Android users. The free app contains full text of all NICE guidance (currently 760 items), organised by conditions, diseases and public health topics. I’ve had a quick play this morning on my ElfPhone and the app looks quite nice. [read the full story…]
NICE have released two new publications that aim to ensure a good experience of care for people who use adult NHS services. The first is a quality standard that stresses the importance of patients being given the opportunity to discuss their health beliefs, concerns and preferences in order to individualise their care. It also states [read the full story…]
Speech and language therapy for adults with a learning disability is concerned with supporting people who have disorders of communication or difficulties with swallowing. Support is developed and designned on an individualized basis following detailed assessment and diagnosis although support and training for carers can be an important part of the support strategy. The NHS [read the full story…]
A good read, this guidance may be an eye opener for NHS commissioners new to the game and wishing to rise above the minutiae of clinical redesign to look, in the round, at the steps involved in commissioning. It presents the principles on social return on investment in public service that can be applied to [read the full story…]
The Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health (JCP-MH) have published the first of their guides aimed at GPs who will soon be commissioning mental health services. Each of the guides provide a description of what a ‘good’ service configuration should look like, and brings together scientific evidence, service user and carer experience, and case studies [read the full story…]
A multidisciplinary group of Dutch scientists have produced a guideline to help diagnose and treat medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUPS) and somatoform disorders (SD) in primary care, hospitals and occupational health settings. The guideline summarises the best available evidence and attempts to answer 4 key questions, for which the following findings are presented: 1. Preventive [read the full story…]
Mental health is an area where a lot of evidence-based guidelines now exist. A lack of evidence isn’t always the problem. In some cases, one of the key issues is that clinicians don’t adhere to the guidelines. The reasons for this can be many and varied: because they don’t know about the guidelines, because it’s [read the full story…]
There are a number of changes underway in the way services for people with epilepsy are organised and delivered, and this new guideline includes a number of recommendations on service provision, the use of newer antiepileptic drugs and guidance in specific areas such as pregnancy and contraception, learning disability, young people. The chapter on epilepsy [read the full story…]
The most recent MeReC Bulletin (December 2011) considers the problem of the implementation gap: the best evidence often does not get adopted quickly into practice. It highlights relevant evidence and ideas from educational theory, decision-making theory, information management and implementation science and brings them together in one place. It is intended to encourage a fresh [read the full story…]
The 8 year old NICE guideline on eating disorders should be updated fairly soon. In the meantime, researchers in Germany have published a new clinical practice guideline on anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. The guideline contains evidence- and consensus-based recommendations for the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders. The guideline is available in [read the full story…]
