Ignore your granny!
Good luck to the GPs heading back to practice tomorrow. It won’t be pretty.
After the annual NHS torture we return to a semblance of normality as the system creaks under the strain of a 4 day break. Working out of hours in the past few days it has been the usual bank holiday story – no hospital beds, ambulances queuing outside A&E and long absent relatives demanding immediate solutions for the chronically neglected. We haven’t see any management for days (so it is not all doom and gloom) and most of the usual machinery of the NHS has ground to a halt. Getting the overflowing bins emptied in the consulting rooms needs a call to the domestics to plead the case.
It won’t come as news to anybody working in the system but it has been a very busy month. To use a technical term – it has been lurgy-tastic for weeks. The HPA agree too and the figures up to Christmas Eve look as bad. This graph is from the week before Christmas and already shows a steep increase in influenza.
GP surveillance data suggests that flu is up 73% on last year. The total call volumes in our own OOH service have been up by about 40% or more on this time last year.
A lot of people assume they have flu until they get the real thing. It tends to come as something of a shock as the real deal is pretty brutal. What did they expect? This is an illness that has killed millions. And these numbers don’t take into account the real story in the clinics of all the snotty nose bugs, the diarrhoea/vomming bugs and the “I think I must have flu but actually I have a heavy cold” crew.
Apparently only 13% of health care workers had their flu vaccine last year. I may get around to it but in the meantime I am going to take Prof Oxford’s advice. Well worth checking out, if only to gaze admiring at his hair. So I will cough into my elbow, give hugging and kissing a wide berth and I will avoid visiting (therefore possibly killing) any elderly relatives.
“no hospital beds”
From a position of unusual smugness, I can say (whilst PCT commissioners can’t hear me) that I’ve got over a dozen beds empty at the moment, so refershingly this isn’t an issue in my corner.
And it makes a world of a difference in feeling so de-stressed through knowing that if hospital in-patient care is needed, it can instantly happen.
I’ve had the ‘flu vaccine once, when I worked in GP land, and felt so awful after it that I’ve been shy to repeat the process. Not sure what EBM has to say on cohorts of medics who do/don’t have the ‘flu vaccine and consequent patient infection rates.
I was fine after the flu vaccine but I once had a couple of anthrax vaccines when it looked as though Her Majesty was going to send me to warmer, sandier climes. Dreadful experience.
It’s always a shock to see an elderly relation after a break of weeks or months – and this is what I’m telling myself after visiting my mother. She called me, she had a ‘bad leg’ and wanted extra help, and she seemed to have gone downhill since I last saw her which is before I was ill.
But I can’t fault the NHS doctors and nurses who looked after her during a recent hospital stay, or the carers who go in and cope with her every day (I live 100 miles away thanks to Norman Tebbitt and his ‘get on your bike’ theories of the 80s) those people have all the gratitude of which I’m capable and then some.
Just an idle thought from a idle person…. so, we all know not to bother gps with untreatable illnesses (“John Heyworth, president of the College of Emergency Medicine, said most people with flu would not need to see a health professional and would be fine within two or three days”, etc, etc) but the stats seem to be based on people who DO seek help from their gps.
I’m being somewhat flippant but…if non of the people with flu or FLI went to their gps would the stats be at all accurate? Are there other criteria/reports that make up the overall picture?
For example, I’m surprised that the numbers of samples testing positive for flu A were approx.100 in week 50; that doesn’t seem many to me. Given that several (>10) of the people I know (me inc.) have had flu or flu-like illness in Dec and went nowhere near their gps I’m curious about whether the stats are baseds only on gps reports.
Apologies if this is an ignorant and/or tedious point
S.
No, you are certainly right. I haven’t been to look but it is almost a certainty that there is much more flu out there than gets reported to the various authorities.
I am guessing that the public health bods assume that the reported cases tend to stay as a fixed proportion of the overall amount of flu. ie they are only the tip of the flu iceberg but a reliably constant tip. It may be a fudge but it is probably a reliable fudge. The alternatives (eg directly asking a large sample of the population) would be too time-consuming to provide useful timely data.
That’s my guess. Happy to be corrected/educated by anyone.