Travel health in the future NHS

In March, NHS England announced a review after local health bosses identified £400m of spending they believe has little or no clinical value.  Travel vaccines were one of the ten 'low value' medicines mentioned on the list - see here to view a BBC news report.   This spurred me to write a personal reflection on the topic for the Practice Nurse Update in April. Also included is the Editorial which covers the subject written by Mandy Galloway.  As the General Election was subsequently called we are now in a period of purdah and no further government information will be released until after June 8th, but please read my article (click on the image below) and ensure for now you are still seeing travellers in a GP setting - you will be receiving funding for this at the present time.  

Factsheets in April

The National Travel Health Network and Centre have some excellent well referenced fact sheets that are either new or updated, posted on their website TravelHealthPro on a regular basis.  

These are also then put into their TravelHealthPro EBook.   Have you tried using this?  It works well on tablets for example and you can subscribe to updates to the E book as well and updates to the website in general.  

So the new factsheets on the website in April were as follows 

•    INSECT AND TICK BITE AVOIDANCE  (updated 4th April)
•    TRAVELLING WITH MEDICINES (updated 5th April)
•    SNAKE BITES AND AVOIDANCE (newly published 13th April) 
•    OLDER TRAVELLERS (newly published 19th April)

Travel Medicine - the Big Picture

Excellence in Healthcare 2017 is a large conference from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.  This particular event is held every 3 years and this is the 4th such occasion.  The travel medicine strand is to be held on Thursday 8th June at 200 St Vincent Street, Glasgow which is a short walk up the hill from the Central Station.  This time we have a number of high profile speakers covering topics such as Zika virus, malaria prospects for the future, humanitarian aid work post Ebola, hepatitis C, the threat of anti-microbial resistance in the tropics and its impact on travel medicine, and the latest on anti-venom research.  Added to this we also have plenary sessions which are related to travel medicine  including entomologist Dr James Logan speaking at the end of the day asking are we ‘Bug Body Ready’?  The event costs £90 to attend for a full day of high quality education, refreshments, exhibition, poster section plus excellent networking.   To look at the website and also to book a place look here or click on the image below.

Malaria Matters

Malaria Matters is an e learning course taking the learner through Guidelines for malaria prevention in travellers from the UK.  I have recently updated the course to the 2016 version of the guidelines. The course takes around 6 hours to complete and now has seven sections to it.  Content contains many different forms of learning including videos, animation, case studies and a certificate of completion at the end of the learning on passing a short assessment.  As I have made this course available free of charge, I would ask you to only undertake it if you're serious in completing the learning.  This is because places on the E-learning platform are limited and will deprive others from using it otherwise.  To enrol click here or the image below.  More information is also available here

Travel Health from A to Zika - a video opportunity

In October last year I presented an advanced workshop at the Best Practice in Nursing Conference at the NEC in Birmingham.  The organisers filmed the session (as they did all of them) and have kindly allowed me to make it available so that if you weren't at the event you could have access on this one occasion.  I've put it into a programme with additional pages to take you to resources relevant to the session and where appropriate added in any updated news.  For example, since I gave it there have been further developments in Zika management advice if you work in the UK.  Why not come along to this year's BPiN conference on 18th and 19th October 2017 - it's a great event.   To see the workshop presentation chaired by Tina Bishop, Editor in Chief of Practice Nurse Journal, CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW.  Please note, the video is almost an hour long so it may take some time to load, depending on your internet speed.  You'll also find access on a page on my website here

A Christmas holiday

I've worked with Practice Nurse Journal since February 2010 writing a regular travel health update article - these days it's mostly every month.  For the last few years, Editor Mandy Galloway has set me a challenge to write something on the Christmas theme, which can be testing but fun as well.  So have a look at this year's contribution by clicking here or on the image below.   On this blog, I've provided the direct links to the references for ease of access - see below the article image.  The piece is light hearted but I hope will also remind you of some key issues and essential considerations!

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RCN Travel Health Library resource

The RCN have a great new library subject guide for travel health which if you're a member, will take you to key resources, books (some available online) and journal articles - a very useful selection available, especially if you're studying right now - check it out HERE   This link takes you to Resources, but beside this are also the headings 'Books' and 'Journals' which would be useful to explore.