Introduction This guidance has been prepared for commissioners and all staff providing lifestyle advice in primary care, including community health and allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists. It aims to raise awareness of the issues caused by inactivity, not just for individuals, but for the health service and economy as a whole, and provides a [read the full story…]
I wonder if the timing of this publication was planned to be so close to the release of DSM-5, but this debut guidance on social phobia (now known as social anxiety disorder) is certainly going to ruffle some feathers. It fuels the discussion about the medicalisation of human personality traits and some will see it [read the full story…]
Bipolar disorder features as one of the top ten disabling disorders for working age adults. There are numerous risks including suicide, increased mortality and reduced social functioning associated with the disorder. Key to enabling recovery is preventing acute episodes from occurring, with each episode increasing the risk of future ones. Therefore ensuring long-term maintenance treatment [read the full story…]
NICE have published a new guide to help commissioners provide evidence-based care for people with dementia. Providing care for our ageing population seems not to have been out of the news in recent years and rightly so, especially as the headline stories are frequently not positive. A recent Care Quality Commission report found that people [read the full story…]
The NICE guideline on the longer-term care and treatment of self-harm was published in November 2011 and contains research published up until January 2011. A group of experts including psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers has compiled an evidence update looking at the high quality research that has been published in the last two years (from [read the full story…]
The Scottish Dental Clinical Effectiveness Programme (SDCEP) has recently launched guidance for the management of patients with acute dental problems. The scope of the guidance is to:- Encourage a consistent approach to the management of acute dental problems to reduce avoidable variation in practice Improve the quality of unscheduled clinical care for patients with acute [read the full story…]
Conduct disorders are the most common reason why children are referred to mental health services and it’s estimated that around 5% of all UK children aged 5-16 have a diagnosis of the condition. Around half of the young people affected by conduct disorders go on to have a serious mental health problem as an adult. [read the full story…]
Last year evidence-based guidelines for cone beam CT (CBCT) were published as part of the SEDENTEXCT project. The guideline is an extensive document that covers many aspect of this developing area. The guideline is based on an extensive review of the available literature and the following categories were considered:- Radiation dose and risk Justification for [read the full story…]
NICE have published a new evidence summary (PDF) on the problems associated with alcohol misuse, which augments the clinical guideline (PDF) that came out 2 years ago. This is a fast moving area, so quite a significant amount of research has been produced in the last 2 years, which may have an impact on clinical [read the full story…]
Everyone who read the extracts from Michael Schofield’s memoir, published by the Guardian on January 19th, must surely have been moved by the sometimes harrowing description of his daughter Janni who was diagnosed with child-onset schizophrenia aged just 7 years old. Janni is an exception, as schizophrenia generally starts between the ages of 15 and [read the full story…]
