Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
GPs are overdiagnosing and overtreating elderly patients, concluded a vote by delegates at the Pulse Live conference in London today.
Delegates agreed by a huge margin - estimated to be around 90% of the room by conference chair Professor David Haslam - that GPs were overtreating elderly patients, with expert practitioners and academics highlighting the problem raised by treating risk factors rather than symptoms.
Speakers stressed the need for in-depth consultations that looked at social interventions as well as prescribing medications, and proactively discussing end-of-life care and the pros and cons of treatment with patients.
The debate follows changes to the GP contract, which involve each patient over the age of 75 being designated a named clinician, and a consultation from NICE on prescribing statins, which proposed that the primary prevention threshold for prescriptions should be halved from 20% to 10%.
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/gps-are...-older-patients/20006584.article#.U2E76vldWAg
(free registration)
Delegates agreed by a huge margin - estimated to be around 90% of the room by conference chair Professor David Haslam - that GPs were overtreating elderly patients, with expert practitioners and academics highlighting the problem raised by treating risk factors rather than symptoms.
Speakers stressed the need for in-depth consultations that looked at social interventions as well as prescribing medications, and proactively discussing end-of-life care and the pros and cons of treatment with patients.
The debate follows changes to the GP contract, which involve each patient over the age of 75 being designated a named clinician, and a consultation from NICE on prescribing statins, which proposed that the primary prevention threshold for prescriptions should be halved from 20% to 10%.
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/gps-are...-older-patients/20006584.article#.U2E76vldWAg
(free registration)