Weekend peak in assault injuries

More people attend A&E following an assault on Friday and Saturday nights than at any other time, data shows.

For the first time, NHS figures revealed the time of day people are most likely to go to A&E for help.

Of almost 13.8 million A&E visits in England in 2008/09, 181,568 (1.3%) were for assault.
Almost half took place over the weekend (between 6pm Friday and 1am on Monday), with a sharp peak on Friday and Saturday nights at around midnight compared with other days of the week.
However, the data, from the NHS Information Centre, is likely to be an underestimate because not all hospitals submit full records of A&E attendances.
The highest number of A&E attendances for any reason happens at 10am, with a second peak on weekdays at 6pm.
Sports injuries account for about 2% (274,056) of all A&E visits, peaking at 4pm on Saturdays, noon on Sundays and 9am on Mondays.
On every day of the week, there is a peak around midnight in the number of people attending A&E after self-harming (0.7% of all recorded attendances or 101,670 in total).
Men and women aged 20 to 29 were the most likely to visit A&E.

AIDS victims not forgotten in Haiti quake chaos

Even in the chaos left by the January 12 earthquake, Resena and her one-year-old baby made their monthly visit to Port-au-Prince's Ghiesko clinic for AIDS treatment, preserving an unbroken lifeline that has sustained them for two years.

Located in the center of the city, Ghiesko (Haitian Group for Studies in Karposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections) is one of the first AIDS clinics in the world to be set up after the disease broke out in 1981.

Amid the surrounding rubble, and cries of desperation and chaos, it continues dispensing AIDS treatement to the thousands of people whose lives depend on it.
"It's a real pleasure for us health workers to see our patients come here despite what has befallen them," said nurse Naomi Jean-Charles as she renewed prescriptions and handed out pills to dozens of nervous people waiting in line.
"I'm surprised they're still coming. But one learns to work in situations of poverty caused by hurricanes and political unrest," said William Pape, the clinic's founder, who has moved the clinics operations to a wing of the building that survived the January 12 earthquake intact.
Supplied with medications by the Global Fund to Fight Aids, the US President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (Pepfar), and the Merieux Institute, the clinic has never suffered an interruption in its stocks of antiretroviral drugs.
"The patients visit us each month and as a precaution we always give them a month a half's treatment so they won't run short," said Pape, who also teaches at Cornell University.
"What worries me more is not our usual patients but this horrible emergency situation, offering care to people who come in from all over with horrible injuries," he said.
Hundreds of injured Haitians have converged on the clinic in the nearly two weeks since the earthquake, along with some 5,000 homeless people who have taken refuge on land next to it.
A military hospital with a surgical unit has set up shop in a rear courtyard of the clinic, with the help from the US Health Department and American volunteer surgeons.
The 28 Ghiesko centers in Haiti care for half of all Haitians receiving anti-retroviral treatment, or about 12,000 patients, about 6,000 of them in the capital. About 300 people, including 18 doctors, work in the center in Port-au-Prince.
After the earthquake, the center broadcast reminders by radio to AIDS patients that their treatments were waiting for them in the capital or in the provinces, and it organized car pools to bring them from their neighborhoods.
"The war against AIDS, we are going to win it. The prevalence of HIV continues to fall in Haiti," Pape said.
It has fallen from 7.2 percent of the population in urban areas in the 1990s to 2.2 percent in 2009 with fewer than 150,000 people infected.
"The treatments are working," said Jean-Charles, the nurse, who said children born with HIV and who today are 30 years old come in regularly for their medications. "It is an achievement," she said with a smile.

Failings 'allowed nurse to murder'

A catalogue of failings allowed a nurse to murder four frail patients, according to a report.

Staff nurse Colin Norris gave the elderly women fatal doses of the diabetes drug insulin while they were being treated at two Leeds hospitals.

According to an NHS Yorkshire and the Humber independent inquiry report, problems including relatives' concerns going unheeded, staff knowledge of clinical governance policies and systems, record-keeping and medicines management, all contributed to the opportunities Norris had to get hold of drugs and murder patients.
In 2008, a judge at Newcastle Crown Court handed Norris, from Glasgow, four life sentences for murdering Doris Ludlum, 80, Bridget Bourke, 88, Irene Crookes, 79, and Ethel Hall, 86, while he worked at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) and the city's St James's Hospital in 2002.
A 20-year minimum sentence, to run concurrently, was imposed for the attempted murder of 90-year-old Vera Wilby, who survived a coma induced by an insulin injection.
The report, published on Tuesday, stated: "Colin Norris was a trained nurse who had access to drug cupboard keys and the means to administer lethal injections to elderly and vulnerable patients.
"There is evidence to suggest that the systems in place at the trust to monitor the supply and administration of drugs at the time of the incidents were not robust enough to identify and prevent malpractice."
It went on to say that actions taken by the consultant and medical director following the collapse of Ethel Hall in November 2002 were "prompt and effective", but if the earlier unexplained deaths of the other women had been reviewed and death certificates accurately completed, Norris's actions might have been spotted earlier.
In addition, problems with references when he was first employed and the merger of the United Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust and St James' University Hospitals NHS Trust meant staff did not have a clear understanding of new systems.
Dr Peter Belfield, medical director of Leeds Teaching Hospitals, said "A determined killer like Colin Norris would be difficult to spot in any NHS organisation but I believe the systems we now have in place would make it much more likely to pick up on someone like this."

Science groups praise treatments

A Government scheme launched last year to speed up patient access to cutting-edge medical advances is already producing positive benefits, industry chiefs said.

The Office of Life Sciences blueprint set out to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies thrive in the UK and turn their research into tangible treatments.

A progress report on the initiative was published entitled Life Sciences 2010: Delivering the Blueprint.
Four industry bodies - the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), the Association of British Healthcare Industries (ABHI), the BioIndustry Association (BIA) and the British In-Vitro Diagnostics Association (BIVDA) - issued a joint statement praising the "strong progress" that had been made.
Key measures in the blueprint included embedding clinical trials into "core NHS activity", an initiative called "Patent Box" designed to retain British discoveries for UK development and manufacturing, addressing skill gaps through the Industry Higher Education Forum, and "Super Cluster" which fosters collaboration between academia, the NHS and industry.
Another initiative welcomed by the industry was the "Innovation Pass" which allows patients with rare diseases access to new drugs not yet assessed for cost effectiveness.
Richard Baker, director general of the ABPI, said: "Work to implement and extend this strategy must be a high priority for both government and industry in the coming years, to maintain the UK's leadership role and the flow of life-changing, innovative therapies for patients."