As Nutrition and Hydration Week 2016 draws to a close it feels right to reflect on how the week has gone. This could be summarised quite simply – amazing. As you will know the aim of the week is to create a global movement that will focus energy, activity and engagement on nutrition and hydration as an important part of quality care, experience and safety improvement….
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Nutrition and hydration week 14 – 20 March 2016 One Easter weekend I opened a newspaper to be greeted with headlines about thousands of people dying from dehydration in NHS hospitals every year. The article was based on a recent publication analysing the role that acute kidney injury had in driving premature mortality in people who were acutely unwell. What is acute kidney injury or AKI…
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During October and November 2015 the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education ran a national campaign on Acute Kidney Injury to engage the pharmacy professions with this high priority area. This covered 65,000 registered pharmacy professionals across England. We developed a six week programme of activities, which sought to progressively engage different members of the team and culminated in every member of the team being asked to…
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“The perfect storm” is an event where a combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically. In the UK we have an established and ever increasing population of people living with diabetes who, by definition, fall into a risk group for developing acute kidney injury (AKI). These people are aged 65 or older and have a pill box full of ACEI, statins and metformin, and are…
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My heart sank as I received a text message from a dear friend. “Grandpa is in hospital with sepsis. He was vomiting, high temperature with pus around his catheter.” The next day my friend informed me Grandpa was “on IV antibiotics and slowly coming round, but he’s not out of the woods yet.” This Grandpa was admitted to hospital from a nursing home, and this nursing home was…
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