Feasibility of school students Skyping care home residents to reduce loneliness

Background Intergenerational friendship has proved useful for older people in increasing socialisation. We explored the feasibility of school students Skyping older people in care homes with the long-term aim of reducing loneliness. Methods Six school students from one secondary school and twenty older people, including seven with mild to moderate dementia, from three care homes, engaged in Skype video-calls over six weeks. A conversational aid aimed to help school students maintain conversations was employed. Students and care staff completed feedback forms after each session on video-call usage, usefulness of the conversational aid, and barriers and benefits of video-calls. Six care staff provided further feedback on residents’ experiences through unstructured interviews. Interviews and field notes were thematically analysed. Results Residents enjoyed Skype-calls with school students. Over six weeks, video-calls became longer, and more residents participated. Analysis revealed four themes. First, the intervention led to increased mobility for three older people and improved self-care in regard to personal appearance for five residents. Second, school students and older people formed friendships which inspired the need to meet in person. Third, the use of video-calls enabled participants to view each other’s environments in real time. Last, directly experiencing the intervention was important for the continued participation of the care staff in the study. Skype-calls between schools and care homes are feasible and may help reduce loneliness. Conclusions Institutional collaboration between educational settings and care homes through cost effective video-calls can be useful to increase socialisation for older people, and promote later on-going use with other external organisations to help reduce loneliness and social isolation

THE NEGATIVE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN A HISTORY OF RECURRENT HERPES LABIALIS AND CERVICAL NEOPLASIA

We considered the possibility that herpetic recurrences and herpes virus associated neoplasia are mutually exclusive disorders because they are expressions of different herpes virus-host relationships. We assumed that the human body copes with orofacial and genital herpes infections in the same manner. In our retrospective study, the relative risk of a history of fever blisters for cervical neoplasia was estimated to be 0.49, with 0.34 and 0.69 as the limits of the 95% confidence interval. It is suggested that recurrent herpes labialis is presumably a determinant of an effective immune response in genera

THE RELIABILITY OF THE HISTOLOGIC DIAGNOSIS IN COLPOSCOPICALLY DIRECTED BIOPSIES - A PLEA FOR LETZ

A total of 121 patients with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) in their punch biopsies were treated by LETZ. In all cases, the transformation zone was fully visible and there were no signs of abnormal cylindrical epithelium. The final diagnosis was classified in accordance with the histologic report showing the most severe lesion. The biopsy diagnosis underestimated the final diagnosis in 27 out of the 121 cases. Invasion was present in five out of these 27 cases. The discrepancies between the biopsy diagnosis and the final diagnosis were not related to the number of colposcopically directed biopsies. It is concluded that an important advantage of LETZ, as compared with tissue-destructive techniques, is the detection of previously unrecognized invasive disease