Shh! Don’t use the ‘q’ word.
Jobbing Doctor comments on a ‘fairly average week’ in the blogosphere. Personally, I’ve been suffering from a rather bloated, morning-after-the-night-before feeling as a result of the blogosphere excesses of last weekend. A proper blogover.
Real life has intervened but curiously, the last few weeks at work have been alarmingly pleasant. Of course, it is bad luck to use the q word at work but I can’t help but comment that it has all gone a bit, er, less busy.
The PCT sent through a load of guff about flu pandemics in the past week or two. That’s usually a sure sign that the worse has passed after a thoroughly unpleasant Chistmas and New Year period. A nasty little flu spike, norovirus running through huge swathes of the population plus umpteen cough and cold bugs made life pretty miserable. Everyone had it and those that can shake it off have done so. Not all have been so lucky.
Just in case you were in any doubt about how busy the health service was – the HPA made this comment on the last few weeks in December 2008;
Since week 50/08 HPA estimates that these have been approximately 9200 [provisional data] all-cause excess deaths compared to the expected number at this time of year. It should be noted that this excess is due to all-causes and cannot be specifically attributed to influenza.
Over 9000 excess deaths. It still amazes me that this kind of eyeball-popping figure sits quietly tucked away on the HPA pages.
The HPA have a whole page of links to fancy graphs for the recent disease burden. There is this graph on weekly consultation rates for coughs, colds and ‘influenza like illness’ (which I suspect is largely a GP code for patients with a nasty cold and not the real deal).
Good spike. We have to go back to Christmas 1999 to hit a similar peak of Total Respiratory Disease (TRD). Presumably this was some cryptic manifestation of the Millenium Bug…
The HPA also have their most recent flu summary here. And they seem to confirm we should be qu.., sorry, not swamped. As an aside regarding flu (especially of you are a health professional who didn’t have their jab) I thoroughly recommend subscribing to Mark Crislip’s Quackcast and digging out the flu myths episode.
It is a similar story with norovirus. There was the normal seasonal spike, it was a touch worse than usual, and we are now on the other side of it.
All in all it was a wicked month for all concerned and it is a relief to draw breath. There are no figures for the most recent weeks but it feels quiet.
Oops, there, I’ve done it now and used the q word. Still it was nice while it lasted.
If you work at the coal face you are aware of this as it happens and not weeks later but it is interesting to see that we were right and that it was as bad as we were claiming.
Yes, I noted yours and several other bloggers comments at the time. It was a mad busy November/December. There still seems to be some difficulty in making the NHS more reactive to these peaks in activity.
I can see the HPA are making some efforts for some ‘real time’ figures but it is still very much an exercise in retrospectoscope observations.
Of course, it also highlights the importance of the population approach. Given 10,000 plus GP practices it is unlikely the excess deaths (<1 per practice) would be commented on at an individual practice level. And although it was painfully obvious at the coal face if I stand up and say that an extra 30 jumbo jets worth of people died this Christmas it looks a touch more dramatic.