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Inside Health

Social prescribing, Topical steroid withdrawal, Pulmonary arterial hypertension

Inside Health

BBC

Health & Fitness, Science

4.4575 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Every GP surgery should provide access to a dedicated social prescriber, according to the Royal College of GPs. Supporting peoples' non-medical needs - including housing, finance and social care - will, it is hoped, free up GP time for urgent medical care and at the same time, provide much-needed access to activities in the community. Arabella describes how social prescribing worked for her. A support worker helped her to join a choir, sort out finances and plan how to return to work after a period of serious illness. Dr Marie Polley, senior lecturer in health sciences at the University of Westminster and co-chair of the Social Prescribing Network (with Dr Michael Dixon) tells Dr Mark Porter that social prescribing will be embedded within medical and social care in the next decade as long as the voluntary sector is supported.

Steroid cream and ointments - like hydrocortisone, clobetasone and betamethasone - are used to treat a number of skin problems. But for some patients long-term topical steroid use can lead to painful, disfiguring and debilitating skin flare-ups. Some call this condition topical steroid addiction. But consultant dermatologist Dr Tony Bewley from Bart's Health in London tells Mark that health care professionals prefer the term topical steroid withdrawal syndrome. He sees the condition fairly often in his clinic and reassures sufferers that there is treatment available. We're used to having our blood pressure checked using a cuff on our arms but we can also have high blood pressure in our lungs. Pulmonary hypertension tends to put our hearts under strain and causes breathlessness. It can be caused by a range of diseases but in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) the raised pressure is due to constriction of the blood vessels. This narrowing of the arteries makes it difficult for the heart to pump blood through the lungs, leading to breathlessness. Inside Health's Dr Margaret McCartney visits the Scottish national specialist centre for the disease at the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Glasgow's Clydebank. She talks to Lorraine who is living with the disease, to pulmonary vascular consultant Dr Colin Church and watches a team led by Dr Martin Johnson performing right heart catheterisation, the gold standard diagnostic test for the disease.

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down.

0:23.0

And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihalina.

0:26.9

I'm excited.

0:27.6

You're dead to me.

0:28.5

The comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

0:30.9

Listen first on BBC Sounds.

0:33.3

This is the BBC.

0:36.7

Hello, coming up in the next half hour, steroid creams and the hazard of overuse for conditions like eczema.

0:43.7

And pulmonary hypertension raised pressure in the circulation around the lungs, an oft-miss cause of breathlessness.

0:51.2

About a year ago, I started to feel really breathless and had a squeak and I went to doctors

0:59.6

and I diagnosed with a chest infection.

1:03.9

But never went away.

1:05.2

More about Lorraine's breathing difficulties later, but first a new initiative that's coming

1:10.1

to a GP surgery near you, if it hasn't

1:13.4

already. Social prescribing is where doctors or other members of the primary care team try and help

1:19.0

patients by referring them to a range of local non-clinical services, anything from exercise programs

1:25.2

at a football club to being given an allotment to look after.

1:28.3

And it's being taken very seriously.

1:31.3

NHS England has highlighted social prescribing as one of ten key strategies for reducing pressures on general practice,

1:38.3

and the Royal College of GPs has called for every surgery to have access to a dedicated social prescriber.

1:45.1

So what can patients expect?

1:47.1

And how might social prescribing help them?

...

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