Friday 21 September 2012

Olympic Legacy



Whatever your highlight of the London Olympics – the Queen parachuting, Mo Farah’s 10,000 metres or Chris Hoy’s sixth gold medal; attention is now turning to the question of “What legacy for the UK?”

The National Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine, which is a £10 million Olympic legacy building at Loughborough University, includes as the name says exercise medicine- for staying healthy, recovering from illness and becoming healthier while living with a long-term condition as well as sports medicine, which is sometimes, focused on elite athletes. I am hoping that all the interest in exercising in chronic kidney disease, particularly the recent call from the National Institute for Health Research for a randomised control trial to assess exercise on dialysis- aptly named PEDAL by Iain MacDougall and Tom Mercer the lead investigators, will put kidney disease in pole position for the development of renal rehabilitation programmes as a top priority.

In the meantime, Hannah Young from the Leicester Kidney Exercise Team sent me the link to the Virginia cycling on dialysis website, which has loads of resources and information on intradialytic exercise, developing and implementing exercise programmes. The link is http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/pub/renal-services/exercise .

If health ranks as highly in the Olympic legacy as the NHS did in the opening ceremony, we will have moved a long way. The paradox of 1000s of hospital beds representing the NHS, when the thrust is to grow primary and community care capability, including self-care and staying healthy did make me chuckle.

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