The first ever EHC Conference on Women and Bleeding Disorders kicks off – Day 1
The first day of the EHC Conference on Women and Bleeding Disorders (WBD) lived up to the promise of a packed agenda, with five hours of presentations and discussion. EHC Chief Executive Amanda Bok warmly welcomed participants, pointing out this was the first international meeting with WBD at its heart – certainly in Europe and …
Spotting the red flags – in patients and in ourselves
The Centre for Mental Health (CMH) is a charity that aims to do the thinking on behalf of the mental health system through research, economic analysis and influencing policy. Chief Executive Sarah Hughes described its activities as tackling ‘areas other people don’t enjoy looking at’. Poor mental health is common – everyone has experienced mental …
Caring Behind Bars
Haemophilia Nurses Association Annual General Meeting, Birmingham March 29th/30th 2019 We hope that most of the haemophilia nurses attending the HNA AGM in Birmingham did not have first hand experience of one of Her Majesty’s prisons but two speakers definitely did. Yvette Carroll, Primary Care Service Manager, and Michele Ramkissoon, Ward Manager, described the challenges …
Contaminated blood – lessons for our future
When Maureen Fearns, a nurse working at the haemophilia centre in Newcastle, and her colleagues founded the Haemophilia Nurses Association in 1982, they didn’t realise how important its networks and mutual support would be. The nurses who wanted to improve patient care by sharing experiences and learning from one another were soon to face the …
Moving beyond Facebook: unlocking the potential of social media for nurses
It’s often said that social media is changing our lives. Speaking at the 2019 HNA meeting in Birmingham, Teresa Chinn disagreed: “our lives have already been changed,” she said. Teresa is a nurse and founder of the Twitter account @WeNurses. She was (and remains) an agency nurse, Tweeting under her own name as @AgencyNurse. Not …
How well do you support the B team?
Christmas Disease, the Royal Disease, the “special ones” – just a few of the alternative names for haemophilia B (full disclosure, I made up that last one). We all know that haemophilia B is less common than haemophilia A, but traditionally they have been considered clinically indistinguishable. However, it has recently been suggested that haemophilia …
Everyone can help improve services – all it takes is an idea
Over the four years that Marie Eales has been a paediatric haemophilia nurse, she has become increasingly aware of the need for further education around immunisation practice for vaccine preventable infectious diseases. Upset parents, she says, “were calling me and letting me know their thoughts and feelings after they’d attended a GP service or had …