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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