Daily digest June 30 2015

Watchdog shocked by NHS failings

A patient was told they should have just wet the bed when they complained they could not get the attention of staff to help them use the toilet for two hours, according to a NHS watchdog.

Healthwatch said its local teams had uncovered 'shocking' treatment over the past year, with cases including a patient in a mental health crisis being told to 'read a book or something' by a 24-hour helpline until her records could be accessed in the morning.

Healthwatch England chair Anna Bradley said: 'The reports coming from local Healthwatch have highlighted a real range of problems across the health and care sector, from basic issues of service to serious failures to provide the level and quality of care we should all expect.'

Healthwatch, the consumer champion for health and social care, also highlighted a case where an older patient in a London hospital was left sitting in their own waste because staff were too busy to change their colostomy bag.

(£) Read more on the Times website

Fizzy drinks' lethal toll

Sugary drinks kill as many as 184,000 adults each year, scientists claim.

Fizzy soft drinks, fruit drinks, energy drinks and sweetened iced teas are causing thousands of deaths and have no health benefits, they said.

And they warned that governments across the world should make it a priority to eliminate such drinks from people’s diets.

A senior author of the study, Dariush Mozaffarian from Tufts University, Boston, United States, said the focus should be on cutting the drinks out of diets to save lives.

Researchers said sugary drinks were implicated in 133,000 diabetes deaths worldwide in one year. Another 45,000 died from cardiovascular disease and 6,450 from cancer. All three diseases have been linked to high sugar consumption

Read more on the the Mail Online website

'Game-changing' lung cancer drug available from today

Lung cancer patients are to be offered a ‘game-changing’ treatment that trains the body to single out and attack diseased cells.

It is being made available under a government policy that enables life-saving treatments to be fast-tracked through the licensing process, which usually takes years.

Administered in a vaccine every two weeks, the drug nivolumab works by teaching the body’s immune system to attack cancerous cells.

Evidence shows the effect continues for several years after the treatment has stopped. Experts have hailed such immunotherapy as a ‘new era’ in the fight against cancer.

Read more on the Mail Online website