IHEEM REGIONAL CONFERENCE 2018
Expert speakers focus on today’s challenges
An IHEEM Regional Conference and Exhibition hosted by the Institute’s Wales Branch in Cardiff in late August took place almost 75 years to the day after IHEEM was founded, and just over 70 years since Aneurin Bevan launched the NHS at Park Hospital in Manchester. Conference topics ranged from fire safety in healthcare facilities to the pros and cons of laminar flow operating theatres. Expert speakers also discussed achieving infection control from several standpoints, and there were updates on the construction of one of two NHS high energy proton beam therapy centres, and a new £350 million hospital being built near Cwmbran which will offer complex specialist and critical care treatment to over 600,000 people in South-East Wales. Here HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports on the conference’s first day.
The conference – held at Cardiff City Hall – began with a welcome from IHEEM Past-President and morning session chair, Greg Markham, who welcomed delegates, exhibitors, and guests, and invited the first speaker, Dr Marion Lyons, senior Medical officer, Health Protection, at the Welsh Government, to the podium. In a short presentation, ‘NHS – looking back, looking forward’, Dr Lyons drew some interesting comparisons between the NHS as it was in 1948, and as it is today. While in 1948, average male and female life expectancies were 66 and 70, today the comparative figures are 70 and 84, and while in the year of the service’s foundation it employed 144,000 personnel, today, as the UK’s biggest employer, the NHS has around 1.7 million staff. Interestingly, hospital bed numbers have fallen – from 480,000 in 1948 to 137,000 in 2018, while in contrast, the number of prescriptions issued annually has risen from 93.6 m in 1948 to 1.2 billion today. Among a raft of ‘major achievements’ in the NHS’s 70 years to date, Dr Lyons noted, had been 1953’s description of the structure of DNA, the introduction of the first measles vaccine in 1968, 1978’s delivery of the first test tube baby, the first liver, lung, and heart transplant in 1986, the establishment of the NHS organ donor register in 1994, and the first double hand transplant in 2010.
Today’s biggest challenges Today, Dr Lyons noted, the service faced ‘unprecedented challenges’, including ‘a growing and ageing population’, ‘health services under unprecedented pressures’, cancer and heart disease remaining the major killers, but dementia now accounting for 10 per cent of all deaths, global warming, antimicrobial resistance, and the ‘very much unknown consequences’ of Brexit. Looking ahead,
The Assembly Hall at Cardiff City Hall, where the conference proceedings took place.
however, she forecast that with the ‘70 years of one-size-fits-all’ era ‘firmly over’, patients could, in future, expect an ‘individual service’, ‘zero tolerance to infection’, increasing innovation and investment in medicines, genetics,
and digital technologies, and growing collaboration between the many different organisations involved in healthcare and illness prevention.
IHEEM Past-President, Greg Markham, welcomed delegates, exhibitors, and guests, to the two-day conference.
Dr Lyons explained that Wales had signed up to a ‘Five-Year Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) action plan’; among its targets are a 10% reduction in the incidence of drug-resistant infections in humans, and a further 15% reduction in antimicrobial use in humans. Proposed commitments include recording diagnosis for all consultations, with electronic prescribing to support good antimicrobial stewardship, the establishment of patient-level prescribing and resistance data, monitoring of the impact of prescribing reductions, and adding of Carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative infections to the list of notifiable diseases. It is also proposed to develop and maintain a single UK portal as a source of data and information on AMR.
October 2018 Health Estate Journal 21
©Cardiff City Hall
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116