Thursday, July 19, 2007

A Miscellany of News

Our local general hospital is, quite obviously, not thr only one in the country under the threat of a reduction in services and beds. Yesterday the BBC reported that Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon visited the Vale of Leven Hospital at Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire where extensive cuts are proposed.

So I visited the website of the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Trust and found a list of service reduction at the Vale of Leven Hospital.

Basically, they cannot afford to pay for locums."Continuing to provide services with locum staff is not acceptable..."

She is quoted as saying "Whatever happens will be subject to independent scrutiny and will go out to public consultation."

Back to my role as transport analyst ... it is a 45 minute bus journey between the Vale of Leven Hospital and the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley where many of the services would be transferred to with buses running every two hours.

Coming south the Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Trust announced on Wednesday 600 job cuts! To make up their deficits … the trade union UNISON is not happy.

I expect (or let us say, hope that, some of) their jobs will be taken up by private companies. But, obviously with loss of salary, pensions, rights etc.

A Miss Otley has sued the Barking and Dagenham PCT in the High Court for not providing Avastin to treat her bowel cancer. After they refused to treat her with Avastin, she used 15,000 pounds of her own money and then when her own money ran out and after much improvement, the PCT refused to continue the treatment. The judge has ruled against the trust. Good news indeed.

Much closer to home … Kezia

Yesterday, a regular visit to the hospital, a blood test and picking up prescriptions. The weekly visits to the hospital seem to be based on her daily 6-mercapturine and weekly oral methotrexate treatment – according to the UKALL 2003 protocol, if her neutophil count is low, then she comes off the mercapturine and methotrexate until the neutrophil count has recovered.Yesterday everything fine.

I was hoping that hospital visits would be less frequent than weekly in this second year – but seemingly not. I will ask our consultant.

Nanda received a consent letter to sign at the hospital yesterday to authorise the use of existing bone marrow samples from Kezia for research into cancer resistance to vincristine. More details to follow.

1 comment:

Lucia said...

I've been on mostly weekly visits for the past 18 months, occasionally fortnightly but mostly two weekly.