Welcome to our blog page.
Here goes - blogging is a new activity for me, and won't be easy in the beginning. But it should be an education - health professionals are increasingly encouraged to write Reflective Practice Diaries, making critical analysis of both one's actions and one's feelings second nature eventually, and improving the quality of care in the process ...
3rd October 2009/Kai: Checking how our site is doing on the search engines - i.e. how easy it is for prospective patients to come across it when searching for "gastric band" and "fill". Great - we're still quite high up on the results returned. However, there is a new entry topping us; this is a nurse practitioner who had a band fitted herself, and was apparently trained in fills by one of the leading Belgian surgeons, advertising gastric band aftercare services in patients' homes anywhere in the British Isles. I'm not sure whether that is a good idea - on the one hand it frees extremely shy or immobile patients from the need to travel to a clinic, but on the other hand there is far less legal protection for the solo practitioner working outside a Healthcare Commission registered premises. If her services do not satisfy the patient, it may be quite difficult to defend herself against complaints. A double-edged sword! I wish her well and hope she has adequate - i.e. specifically bariatric - professional indemnity insurance (which is far from cheap).
20th October 2009/Kai: What strikes me quite often is how little the wider public, the media, and even a proportion of experienced health professionals know in the way of hard facts about WLS. This is illustrated by an otherwise very informative article in the Mail today - a trio of sisters who underwent WLS together are described. Amazingly, both the headline and accompanying illustration clearly state that gastric banding was involved, whereas the text describes that they had gastric bypass operations (i.e. malabsorptive surgery). A different kettle of fish altogether! I congratulate the Mail on devoting sufficient space to the topic, but am saddened that the reporter got it so wrong.
10th November 2009/Kai: We have had several customers recently who have had their band surgery in the Czech Republic. The surgery part seems absolutely fine, but many of them were under the impression (apparently created by the UK marketing organisation) that they would need little or no fills before reaching proper restriction. This is, in our view, quite misleading information. In general many bandsters who have not been given sufficiently detailed information beforehand expect to lose a great deal of weight very rapidly once they have had their surgery - this is simply not the case: Serious weight loss really only occurs once the band has been filled to give adequate restriction (which will take at least several weeks if not months). It's simply a case of mistaken expectations which can unfortunately result in considerable disheartening. Once again, we wish info provision "out there" was better ...
2nd January 2010/Kai: Today I experienced my first port access fail! Probably not bad after 2 years in business - but nonetheless very disappointing for the patient and quite an injury to my professional pride. I think the port has actually "flipped over" (it is known not to have been secured in position by a suture), thereby becoming inaccessible from the front, and we advised the customer to have a radiological check with the original surgeon abroad, which is supposed to be part of her original package. I'm looking forward to hearing the outcome and hope to see her again at a later stage.