Health tips from YouTube

Many of my friends often scoff at YouTube as being full of pointless videos of teenagers partaking in ridiculous activities. It has taken a great deal of coercion to bring them round to the fact that YouTube actually features some very useful healthy living videos. Therefore, in a further effort to reach out to them, i thought that it would be a valuable exercise to post a few examples of health videos that i have come accross on YouTube. There are thousands of videos covering a diverse range of health-related topics: food and nutrition, excerise and fitness, private health insurance and everything in-between - these are just indications of what is out there.

100 Life Saving Health Food Tips - some great advice on this little video, there may be something that surprises you!



"Health Food" vs. Healthy Food -- How to read labels



Health and Exercise Tips - This is one in a large series of videos with some excellent fitness tips.





Hope you found something of interest - if there are any health videos that i may have missed out please get in touch and i can update the post.

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Increase in Screening is Jade's Legacy

Questions remain over the coverage of the tragic death of Reality TV star Jade Goody, we found some of it rather intrusive (ie pictures of her family leaving her bedside day after day), although apparently Jade herself was keen to document her final days in detail.

Anyway, press coverage notwithstanding, it seems that Jade's fight has had a positive effect on the cervical cancer screening rates amongst the traditionally hard two traditonally hard-to- reach demographics - the 25 to 35 year old age group, and people of lower socioeconomic groups.

According to BBC News:

Julietta Patnick, director of NHS screening programmes, said some laboratories are reporting a 20% increase in cases, others as much as 50%.

On targeting persons from socioeconomic sectors, medical director of Cancer Partners UK, Professor Karol Sikora told the BBC:

"What is interesting is that if you look at the number of people who take up the offers, it is on average 70%.

"If you break that down to socioeconomic groupings it is about 90% in class one - wealthy and educated people - and something like 50% in some geographical areas of Britain where there are predominantly people living in deprivation with poor education," he said.

"What Jade's story does is get to groups you can not get to with other methods.

"Putting out a leaflet or an advert on TV just does not work.

"She appeals to socioeconomic groups four and five, people who read the tabloids rather than the broadsheets."

Increasing the awareness of this issue withing these difficult spheres is a signififcant legacy for Jade to leave. Hopefully early detection will ensure that thousands of other won't share her fate.

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Stafford Hospital Scandal - Symptomatic of a failing system?

We are sure that like us, you felt an immense degree of shock and anger over the reports reagdrding the extent of the emergency care failings at Stafford General Hospital. It is unbelieveable that in this day and age a hospital is allowed to decline so much that 400 'excess deaths' can occur.

This data came from a Healthcare Commission report into the hospital published this week - although it did caveat that the cause of these 'excess deaths' could not be directly attributed to bad care.

According to the report almost 'every stage' of Staffords emergency service department had major failings, with managers consistently pursuing target levels ahead of ordinary patient care.

It seems that this combined with low levels of staff, inadequate nursing, poor levels of equipment, no real leadership, lack of training and ineffective problem management systems contributed to the overall shambolic nature of this department.

The Prime Minister Gordon Brown has today publicly apologised for the failing hospital. He said:

"We do apologise to those people who have suffered as a result of the mistakes that have been made at Stafford Hospital."

He did not however place any blame upon the target based system of managing NHS hospitals, instead highlighting "low standards of management".

What is of particular worry to us here at YPHI is that we are not entirely confident that Stafford is the only NHS hospital that has suffered from such a devastating combination of failures. Are poor management practices and unrealistic target levels turning too many of our hospitals into Spreadsheet-run establishments with little regard paid to patient care? or is this entire sorry episode sympomatic of a system creaking under the weight of an ageing population and rising crime levels?

Let us know your opinions.

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Quick Wins to Improve Your Health

There are literally thousands of web pages devoted to providing health tips and advice. However, the internet being as it is, the quality of the information supplied can at times leave a lot to be desired. Some guides make the mistake of delving into too much detail, frightening potential health-improvers off, other are just plain wrong with the data that they provide.

Therefore, for the benefit of you, our loyal readership, we took it upon ourselves to trawl the length and breath of the blogosphere and find the best posts available on health improvment. Feel to to comment with any that you have discovered.

15 Simple Changes that will improve your health - Conscise and well written post from Dumb Little Man, broken down into improving your Eating Habits, Drinking behaviour and Excercise - great stuff.

45 best health tips ever - Health 24 with a comprehensive health inprovement list - there really is something for everyone here, no matter what health problem you may have.

Top 10 Mens Health Myths - Excellent article from the Times Online from Dr Keith Hopcroft - essetial reading for all the men out there.

Daily Health Tips - There's a wealth of advice on Daily Health Tips that we couldn't possibly cover within this post. Needless to say, everything from Excercise, Diet, Nutrition and Medical Health is covered.

Age Concern - Top Ten Health Tips - Some good common sense advice for the elderly from Age Concern.

These are just some of the best sources of advice out there, we chose them as they cover a diverse range of age groups and health issues.

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