Postgraduate medical journal
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A thorough social history is an important component of all medical clerkings and is particularly crucial when admitting an older patient. Standards exist to guide the social history content but are rarely referenced in practice. ⋯ Over a 15-week period with two cycles of intervention involving 125 patients in total, there was good staff engagement and overall improvement in social history documentation with 194/403 (48.1%) vs 199/545 (36.5%) criteria met overall and on average 6.3/13 vs 4.7/13 criteria documented for each patient. The social history BLANKETS tool is a memorable acronym to prompt clerking doctors to take a thorough and focused social history which is intrinsic to determining appropriate rehabilitation goals for effective discharge planning and setting appropriate ceiling of care decisions.
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A worldwide vaccination campaign is underway to bring an end to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; however, its success relies heavily on the actual willingness of individuals to get vaccinated. Social media platforms such as Twitter may prove to be a valuable source of information on the attitudes and sentiment towards SARS-CoV-2 vaccination that can be tracked almost instantaneously. ⋯ Lexicon-based Twitter sentiment analysis is a valuable and easily implemented tool to track the sentiment regarding SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. It is worrisome that the sentiment regarding the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine appears to be turning negative over time, as this may boost hesitancy rates towards this specific SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.