Kent Health News and Events

Reacting to a report from the Health Select Committee suggesting that the NHS faces ‘one of its greatest challenges’ dealing with patients with long-term conditions such as diabetes, Professor Stephen Peckham says that delivering care in the community may prove more expensive than hospital care.

He said: ‘Shifting services from hospitals to the community is difficult and complex but essentially the right thing to do for many people. Many patients would prefer community-based support -although as the recent Pilgrims Hospices saga has demonstrated – closing any in-patient beds (even outside of the NHS) is very contentious.

‘However, no one can say what the correct balance between hospital and community care should be. It will require additional investment in community services, which will first lead to an additional cost pressure – you cannot simply close down hospitals or parts of hospitals and then create community services. Delivering care in the community is not necessarily cost-saving and may be even more expensive than hospital care.

‘The UK’s track record on integrated care – whether between social services and health or within health services – is poor and we do not have good quality evidence to demonstrate that many community based initiatives are effective and provide better outcomes for people. There is currently a lot of support for looking at integrated services and there are models of good practice but these are rarely observed in practice.

‘A study on moving care closer to home concluded that that there is considerable potential to move care into the community and so improve access and convenience for patients. However, important issues of quality, safety, cost and staff training need to be considered as community based services are expanded. Public perceptions are also important. Research on public perceptions of high quality care suggests that people perceive that hospitals are ‘where the experts are’. The public is not convinced that the necessary skills are there in primary and community care for chronic disease management. Concurrent work is also needed to address this perception.

‘Finally attention needs to be paid to the financial and incentive structures in the NHS. Although the shift from acute to primary is difficult to envisage the work around outcomes-base commissioning particularly incentivising joint outcomes might be a building block in this. The Centre for Health Services Studies is involved in contract modelling work with the local NHS. For example, this envisages that the orthopaedic surgeon will get paid when a patient can walk three stairs at home after a hip operation.’

A team of PhD students from Medway School of Pharmacy have raised over £1000 for the British Heart Foundation by taking part in the legendary London-to-Brighton bike ride.

The team ‘Drug Peddlers’ were Lee Mun Ching, Kirsti Robertson, Jen Blackburn, Jackie Walsh, Ryan Catahan (University of Kent student), Filip Kunc, Colin Moore and Stuart Mather. Two other students, Kallie Bladon and Lou Krska were also part of the team and took part in training but unfortunately had to pull out before the day due to injury.

The British Heart Foundation is the UK’s biggest funder of heart research and the team were proud to raise money that will go toward pioneering research on coronary heart disease, the number one cause of death in the UK. Over 28,000 cyclists took part on Sunday 15th June for the beautiful but grueling course that starts on Clapham Common, South London and finishes on the Brighton seafront.

The ‘First Three Years’ Movement and the Infant Brain: A Review of Critiques

This article reviews a particular aspect of the critique of the increasing focus on the brain and neuroscience; what has been termed by some, ‘neuromania’. It engages with the growing literature produced in response to the ‘first three years’ movement: an alliance of child welfare advocates and politicians that draws on the authority of neuroscience to argue that social problems such as inequality, poverty, educational underachievement, violence and mental illness are best addressed through ‘early intervention’ programmes to protect or enhance emotional and cognitive aspects of children’s brain development.

The movement began in the United States in the early 1990s and has become increasingly vocal and influential since then, achieving international legitimacy in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and elsewhere. The movement, and the brain-based culture of expert-led parent training that has grown with it, has been criticised for claiming scientific authority whilst taking a cavalier approach to scientific method and evidence; for being overly deterministic about the early years of life; for focusing attention on individual parental failings rather than societal or structural problems, for adding to the expanding anxieties of parents and strengthening the intensification of parenting and, ultimately, for redefining the parentchild relationship in biologised, instrumental and dehumanised terms.

This publication is now available to view – pdf. Macvarish, Jan and Lee, Ellie J. and Lowe, Pam. (2014) The ‘First Three Years’ Movement and the Infant Brain: A Review of Critiques. Sociology Compass, 8 (6). pp. 792-804.

Who is involved?
Jan Macvarish

The MSc in Applied Health Research is designed to be studied over one year full-time or two years part-time. There are three compulsory modules, and students must take a further three of the four optional modules. To be awarded a MSc in Applied Health Research students will be required to obtain 180 M level credits including the dissertation module which comprises 60 credits.

The programme is divided into 2 stages. Stage 1 comprises of taught modules totalling 120 credits. Postgraduate students are required to obtain 60 credits of core modules, and 60 credits from a choice of optional modules.

At Stage 2 students are required to obtain 60 credits through a compulsory dissertation module. Students must successfully complete each module in order to be awarded the specified number of credits for that module.

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