NEWS
A high-profile campaign on stroke awareness has been relaunched by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.
The award-winning ‘Act F.A.S.T’ campaign, first launched in Feb- ruary 2009, is thought to have boosted public awareness of the importance of getting people who are having a stroke to hospital as quickly as possible through its graphic description of stroke “spreading like fire” through the brain.
The campaign’s television adverts were re-screened for three weeks during March 2011 as part of a £740,000 campaign.
Lansley said reminding people of the key messages would save
Mawell acquires Euromed
Medical imaging and digital dicta- tion firm Euromed Networks AB has been taken over by Nordic healthcare company Mawell.
Mawell’s CEO, Jan E Larsson, said the acquisition, via a 100% share purchase, would make it the “mar- ket leader”, if approved at an ex- traordinary general meeting sched- uled for April 2011.
Euromed was founded in Sweden in 1999 and began expanding into the UK from 2007, opening a sales office in London in 2008.
The national roll-out of bowel screening for people aged 60-69 has seen the bowel cancer diag- nosis rate rise by more than 12% in England.
The rise occurred between 2006 and 2008, according to new figures from Cancer Research UK. Bowel screening has since been extend- ed to anyone aged 60 to 74.
Catherine Thomson, Cancer Re- search UK’s head of statistics, said: “These figures are evidence that the bowel cancer screening
programme is helping to find cas- es of bowel cancer sooner.
“Without the screening pro- gramme it’s likely that many of these cancers would not have been found for another few years, by which time they would be harder to treat.
“It’s expected that when all of the national screening programmes across the UK have been up and running for a couple of years, that similar results will be seen for the whole of the UK.
“And hopefully the screening programme will soon reduce the number of deaths from bowel cancer.”
Before the introduction of the national screening programme in England, bowel cancer rates in the 60-69 age group had never increased by more than 2.1% in any two-year period in the last decade.
Then, after the introduction of screening in 2006, rates rose dra- matically for 2007.
lives and formed part of the Gov- ernment’s wider strategy to im- prove stroke outcomes.
The Institute of Practitioners in Ad- vertising (IPA) awarded it ‘Gold’ for effectiveness in November 2010.
F.A.S.T. – which stands for Face, Arm, Speech, Time to call 999 – has stuck in people’s minds, according to Joe Korner, com- munications director at The Stroke Association, who said: “We know these adverts have saved lives by making people aware of the symp- toms of stroke and the importance of getting to hospital quickly.
“Many people have contacted us to say how they’ve used F.A.S.T. and how it’s made a difference to the recovery of their loved ones.
“We’re pleased with the impact and progress the campaign has made and urge everyone to re- member the F.A.S.T. message.”
According to National Audit Office figures for 2008/09, direct stroke
care costs the NHS at least £3bn a year, within a wider economic cost of about £8bn, including lost income and productivity as a re- sult of disability.
The DH said there has been a de- crease in awareness in the seven months the campaign was off-air, from 79% in March 2010 to 62% in early 2011, down from a peak of 82% when the ads first aired in 2009.
Awareness of the F.A.S.T. cam- paign is particularly low among Afro-Caribbean and South Asian people, among whom there is a higher prevalence of stroke, re- search shows.
FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit
www.nhs.uk/actfast
Doctors have welcomed the Coalition Government’s decision to rule out price competition by amending the Health and Social Care Bill to prevent differential pricing between NHS and private providers.
The BMA was quick to welcome the commitment, with its chair- man of council, Dr Hamish Mel- drum, saying: “Price competition has been linked with lower qual- ity and was of huge concern to the BMA and many others. We welcome the fact that the Health Secretary has not only listened
long way to go to address all the concerns doctors have about the Bill, such as Monitor’s powers to enforce competition.
“We will continue to press for further improvements and hope the Government will continue to listen.”
Hamish Meldrum
to doctors’ views, but also acted on them. There is of course still a
The Government has denied that it has undertaken a swift U-turn, saying price competition was never an intention of the NHS re- forms. Others have disputed this, pointing to the original wording of the Bill which they said left the
question open with reference to ‘maximum tariffs’.
A Department of Health press release from January also un- dermined the insistence that the policy had not changed. It read: “In the future, Monitor will have a vital new role in ensuring effec- tive competition and a level play- ing field, acting in the interests of patients and the taxpayer. They will also oversee the process of price competition, which is to be allowed only where it is deemed appropriate and where it will not harm quality of service.”
national health executive Mar/Apr 11 | 11
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