The NHS information centre said the pay of a practice nurse in band 6 has increased to 33,800 while a health visitor in band 7 is now earning 38,800.

Latest figures from the body show that average nurse income rose by 9.6% in the year to September 2008 to reach 33,100.

Unqualified nurse income increased even faster by over 10% from 17,900 to 19,700.

Backdated pay rises under Agenda for Change have created a ‘spike’ Read more »

Researchers are calling recent findings the tip of the iceberg.

MedPage Today reports on a paper from Brain, showing that players who suffered a single concussion playing college-level sports had “greater declines in attention and memory and a slowing of some movements more than 30 years later compared with those who never had a concussion.”

The National Football League is currently conducting its own study, looking at the long-term Read more »

by Ana Dupuis

For many people, getting a massage is a special way to pamper themselves from time to time. This is very true for a considerable number of individuals. But there’s more to massage than that. It can also provide relief for quite a few health problems. Among its benefits are an improvement in your blood circulation and strengthening of your immune system. It can also lead to an overall sense of well being. Some health problems Read more »

Imagine if you’re the attending on record in the ICU, and find that the federal government is investigating your care in end of life scenarios.

Pallimed discusses an article detailing that exact circumstance at a VA hospital.

Although they found no wrongdoing, they did find “significant variations with the interpretation of appropriate end of life management in the ICU, and recommended the establishment of new guidelines.”
Read more »

40 surgeries in Westminster PCT will identify patients on their registers who have a greater than a 20% risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Those deemed to be at risk of CVD will be referred to a 16-week nurse-led programme of exercise and heath advice.

Adrian Brown, consultant in public health medicine at Westminster PCT, said that the scheme would act as a DoH ‘test bed’ from which learning could be shared with Read more »

by Barry Miller

Is your big stomach causing you a lot of insults and predicaments? Have you been wishing for a flat tummy? Do you desire to achieve that hourglass figure without taking any pills or having liposuction? Do you want to obtain them all without losing large money and endangering your healthy living because some of these lose fat around stomach programs have its ill effects? Read this entire article and you might as well learn something Read more »

Medicare recently expanded their coverage for off-label use of cancer drugs.

These medications are among the most expensive, and especially in cases of end-stage treatment, there may not be a lot of evidence supporting their use.

For the most part, oncologists and patients (via the WSJ Health Blog) have hailed the decision, but others say that the increased ability to give off-label drugs “let physicians avoid hard discussions Read more »

by Simon Newsome

Due to the considerable hype generated by the weight loss and diet pill industry about hoodia diet pills, it is almost impossible to judge the quality of a product by looking at their high-gloss websites. One online commentator claims that between 60%-80% of all hoodia weight loss products are not what they claim, ranging from not entirely pure through to not even remotely close. You can read more about how to spot the genuine Read more »

Speaking in Parliament last week, she said: ‘The overall exception rate for England reduced from 5.83% in 2006/7 to 5.26% in 2007/8. Independent research shows that practices in deprived areas are slightly more likely to exception-report patients than practices in affluent areas – I believe that the difference is less than 1%.

‘The research concludes that GPs in deprived areas achieved high QOF scores without high rates Read more »

Speaking at the second in a series of BMA political lectures in London on Tuesday evening, Mr Lansley told delegates that GPs’ willingness to manage resources and design services was the ‘critical issue’ of Conservative health policy.

‘Somewhere in the system there has to be a group of people we can trust. GPs are the only ones who can put those things together – making clinical decisions and managing resources,’ Read more »