|
|
Opinion - AMA picks up the ball on two important issues |
Finally the AMA has found two issues that touch base with us at the coalface of general practice. The first is a call to ban fast food advertising to children. The second concerns married couples and nursing homes.
Children, food and exercise
Let me offer some anecdotes:
1. Obesity in Australia has increased 60% in the last six years.
2. Our Federal Health Minister has warned of an impending epidemic in diabetes.
3. 66% of Australians males and 50% of Australian females are overweight.
4. 20% of all food consumed in America is consumed in a motor vehicle.
5. The average Southern Italian family spends an hour over the evening meal, the average Australian five minutes.
6. Most Australian evening meals are consumed in front of television.
7. The lifestyle of the Information Age is increasingly sedentary. 25% of jobs in England are in call centres, which involve sitting for an entire shift. We seem to have remote controls for everything: garage doors, televisions, videos, stereos, and so on.
8. Australians eat too much fat, sugar and salt and not enough fresh fruit and vegetables.
9. In 1970 there were 700 processed food items in supermarkets; today there are more than 17,000. Most have added salt, fat and sugar to supposedly enhance the flavour.
10. A McDonalds’ bun is classified by WHO as a cake, not bread, because of its fat and sugar content.
11. A piece of chocolate mud-cake in a coffee shop can contain up to 85 grams of fat. This is nearly three times the recommended maximum of 30 grams of fat a day.
12. A modern donut contains more fat than the bread and dripping our grandparents used to eat.
Our increasing unfitness and our increasing BMI is a major public health problem in Australia. We need to influence children’s eating and activity habits early to stop them heading down this path in the first place.
Couples and nursing homes
The AMA has come out to encourage double beds in nursing homes. It has highlighted the problem of what happens when one partner in a marriage becomes so frail that they require nursing home management but the other could be managed in a hostel. When this happens, these two people are expected to spend their last years separated.
This is absolutely ludicrous. It is one of the public health issues that cause me a great deal of anguish. Aged couples that I see desperately hope that if one of them becomes frail they will die before they are admitted to a nursing home and separated from their spouse.
The Federal government must instruct ACAT teams that a high level assessment is to be for the couple, not just one of them. The offer must be made to house them together for their final years.
Try to imagine what it must be like to be separated from your life’s partner because one of you becomes frailer than the other and needs a higher level of care.
It is with a great sigh of relief that the AMA has finally come down to earth (for now!).
Graeme Burger is the chair of the department of general practice in Tweed Heads District Hospital. He practises in Coolangatta.
|
|
|
|
