British Geriatrics Society

The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) Annual Scientific Meeting took place in Orlando in early May.

Having never attended a conference in the United States before, I was unsure what I would find, but was expecting to be blinded by science and cutting edge geriatric medicine techniques. To my surprise, I discovered that although there is a large research base centred around the main University Hospitals, care of older people in smaller, more general units is often below the levels we would expect in the UK, with geriatricians and allied health professionals struggling to establish programmes to tackle delirium, dignity, and provide Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment to those who need it. 

Most Departments of Geriatric Medicine will, at sometime or other, have expressed concerns about the quality and availability of locums. There is now an alternative. Rather than use locums, hospital Trusts could  use the Medical Training Initiative (MTI) scheme to fill the posts. The savings on locum costs could be used to fund the salaries of additional doctors or other healthcare professionals.

By 2006, the growing influx of international medical graduates had led to widespread unemployment and dissatisfaction among international graduates and was threatening the very career structure of graduates from the United Kingdom. The government responded by withdrawing the permit-free visa status previously enjoyed by international medical graduates.^[1] The flow halted, but there were predictable downsides. In the short term, many international medical graduates already in the UK had to return home. In the longer term, educational links that had been fostered since the beginning of the NHS were threatened.^[2]

The prevalence of delirium in people on medical wards in hospital is about 20 - 30 per cent, and 10 - 50 per cent of people having surgery develop delirium.

On the BGS website, the fact that our clinical guideline on the prevention, diagnosis and management of delirium in older people in hospital has long featured as one of the ten most downloaded pages would indicate that this is an important clinical issue for many health professionals.