Mental Health in the News

"Hospital staff 'lack skills to cope with dementia patients'," The Guardian has today reported. The newspaper says that the National Audit of Dementia has found that the care dementia patients receive is "impersonal" and that they "suffer boredom".

"Alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing," Metro reported today. The news is based on a study that found that people listening to loud club music rated alcohol as tasting sweeter than those who were either listening to nothing at all, to a news story, or to a mix of music and news.

Cervical cancer smear tests "could be improved by adding a further test looking for signs of a virus which causes it", the BBC has reported.

The headline "Four in 10 drugs wrongly administered in hospitals" may have caused undue concern to readers of The Daily Telegraph today. Similar claims in The Independent gave a misleading impression of some valuable new research into the way medicines are given in hospital.

As many as 24,000 people with diabetes are dying unnecessarily each year, many of the papers have reported today. This shock statistic was a conclusion from the National Diabetes Audit, the first ever report to look at deaths from the condition.