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Stockport NHS Foundation Trust ends the “silent era” with CardMedic roll-out

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Stockport NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with CardMedic across the organisation, enabling its 6,300-strong workforce to communicate more clearly and confidently with patients who face language or communication barriers.

CardMedic is a digital healthcare communication platform that allows staff and patients to communicate safely and effectively irrespective of language barriers, cognitive impairment or literacy.

The platform provides instant access to live interpreters in 200+ languages via Language Line, alongside thousands of clinically validated scripts in multiple languages and formats, including British Sign Language (BSL), Easy Read, and Read Aloud.

It also supports health literacy for same language patients by explaining information in plain language, clearly and succinctly.

The Trust provides acute and community health services to a population of around 300,000 people across Stockport.

Pam Fearns, Chief Nursing Information Officer at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, led the project’s implementation.

“CardMedic will enable patients to voice their needs where previously they may have struggled to communicate them,” she said.

“All conversations — such as asking whether someone wants a cup of tea, explaining a procedure, or offering reassurance — play a vital role in ensuring inclusivity.

“CardMedic enables equality across our services.”

With a diverse community, reliance on face-to-face interpreting has led to rapidly increasing annual costs, and communication barriers have increasingly impacted patient experience and safety.

Introducing CardMedic will help address these pressures by providing staff with a single point of access to a suite of clinically designed communication support tools.

The cost-effective, vendor-agnostic platform connects staff to the Trust’s existing language service providers via its Call an Interpreter feature, accessible on any device and any location.

Streamlined access will reduce use of disparate and ad hoc solutions, empowering staff to deliver more efficient and equitable care.

This groundbreaking collaboration will see CardMedic deployed across 455 SPARK Fusion® patient bedside devices on 20 wards at the Trust’s Stepping Hill Hospital.

This integration brings universal communication support directly to the bedside, giving patients and clinicians greater access, privacy, speed, and confidence in every interaction.

The Trust has taken a “big bang” approach to launching CardMedic, introducing it across all its acute and community settings. From day one, it has been available in all inpatient areas to maximise reach and equity of access.

Key areas of engagement include emergency, maternity, and acute medical units, supported by digital nurses, midwives, and clinical champions across the organisation.

The rollout also extends to community staff, including community midwives, school nurses, allied healthcare professionals, Macmillan nurses and district nurses.

The launch is backed by an extensive communications campaign using the slogan ‘the silent era is over’.

This term was coined by Karen Lawrence in the Digital Skills Team following discussions with the Digital Nursing Team about giving a voice to the “silent patient”.

This gave her the idea of silent movies in black and white. Now the introduction of CardMedic is bringing colour back to these patients as they are no longer silenced.

The rollout reflects the Trust’s commitment to its core CARE values of Compassion, Accountability, Respect, and Excellence.

It also aligns with regional efforts to reduce inequalities and national priorities such as the Patient safety healthcare inequalities reduction framework, the Accessible Information Standard, and the Core20PLUS5 Health Inequalities Programme.

The Trust’s passion for equitable care is evident throughout the partnership.

The top five non-English languages spoken in the local area are Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Kurdish Sorani, and Cantonese. To support the Trust’s community, CardMedic is adding Kurdish Sorani to its platform for the first time.

Dr Rachael Grimaldi, CEO and Co-Founder of CardMedic, said: “Stockport NHS Foundation Trust has demonstrated what equitable care in action looks like.

“No patient will be left without a voice in their care.

“By embedding CardMedic across wards and bedside devices, enabled through our partnership with SPARK TSL, they’re enabling communication that is instant, safe, and scalable.

“The partnership won’t just improve care for patients who face a language barrier. With CardMedic’s Easy Read and Read Aloud formats, it also helps support improved health literacy when language isn’t the main issue.”

Jane Stephenson, CEO at SPARK TSL, added: “This pioneering project demonstrates how technology can strengthen patient-centred care.

“ We’re proud to be working with Stockport NHS Foundation Trust and CardMedic on embedding inclusive communication support in our SPARK Fusion® bedside devices.

“Together, we’re making healthcare more accessible for all.”

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Wellness

Elimination of cervical cancer in EU an ‘achievable goal’, report finds

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Cervical cancer elimination in the EU is becoming achievable as HPV vaccination coverage rises, a new report says.

As Europe marks European Immunisation Week 2026, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said progress in human papillomavirus vaccination is continuing across the EU and European Economic Area.

All EU and European Economic Area countries now recommend HPV vaccination for adolescent girls and boys as part of their immunisation programmes, marking a major step forward in Europe’s cancer prevention efforts.

Bruno Ciancio, head of unit, directly transmitted diseases and vaccine preventable diseases at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said: “The elimination of cervical cancer in the EU/EEA is becoming an achievable goal, thanks to the HPV vaccination programmes.

“The progress we are seeing across Europe demonstrates what can be accomplished when countries invest consistently in effective immunisation strategies.

“We are closely monitoring this progress and actively supporting countries to accelerate uptake and move faster towards cervical cancer elimination.”

According to the report, three EU and European Economic Area countries, Iceland, Portugal and Norway, have reached the 2024 EU Council Recommendation target of 90 per cent HPV vaccination coverage among girls by the age of 15.

Fifteen years after HPV vaccination programmes were introduced in Europe, a growing body of evidence confirms the vaccine is highly effective in preventing cervical cancer.

Large-scale studies from Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as other parts of the world, have shown significant reductions in HPV infections and precancerous lesions, which are abnormal cell changes that can develop into cancer if left untreated, alongside falling cervical cancer rates among vaccinated women.

Since 2020, European countries have reported a decreased incidence of cervical cancer among vaccinated women.

Studies from Sweden, Denmark and the UK show that early administration of the vaccine increases its full protective potential.

A Swedish study suggested that vaccinating girls before their 17th birthday reduced the incidence of cervical cancer by 88 per cent.

An additional six-year follow-up found a sustained reduction in cervical cancer risk and a population-level decline in invasive cervical cancer incidence after HPV vaccination.

The report showed that vaccination programmes and health system design are critical factors in reaching high levels of HPV vaccination coverage.

Evidence from across Europe showed that school-based vaccination programmes are particularly effective and tend to reach higher levels of coverage among both girls and boys.

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Mental health

Poor mental health, poverty and pollution significantly raise women’s heart failure risk – study

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Poor mental health, poverty and pollution can raise women’s heart failure risk, with up to one in four cases potentially preventable, a study has found.

UK Biobank data from more than 230,000 women suggest that depression, socioeconomic hardship and exposure to polluted environments are linked to a significantly higher risk of heart failure in women.

Heart failure happens when the heart becomes too weak or too stiff to pump blood effectively around the body.

High blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and diabetes are among the better-known risk factors often targeted in public health campaigns.

Peige Song from China’s Zhejiang University and her team found that living in polluted areas, having poor mental wellbeing, facing socioeconomic deprivation and experiencing chronic inflammatory conditions such as lupus, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues, make women more prone to heart failure.

These risks, however, are often overlooked.

The researchers found that mental wellbeing, environmental exposures, socioeconomic circumstances and reproductive history together contributed almost as much risk for heart failure as all well-known risk factors combined.

The study also found that risk rises with socioeconomic hardship and chronic inflammatory conditions such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, approaching the impact of conventional risk factors.

Song said: “[The study] is a call to redefine prevention in women’s cardiovascular health, integrating biological, psychosocial and structural determinants into a unified, equitable approach.

“One in four heart-failure cases in women could be prevented if all under-recognised risk factors were eliminated, assuming causal relationships.”

While completely eliminating all risks is not realistic, Song said “even partial reductions through better mental health services, social equity policies and environmental regulations could yield significant public health benefits”.

Catherine Pirkle, a women’s health specialist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the US, who was not involved in the study, said: “These calculations show convincingly that under-recognised and female-specific risk factors contribute significantly to heart failure in women, independently of the well-established ones.”

Song said: “It’s important to understand that heart health is influenced by more than just blood pressure or cholesterol.

“Factors like mental wellbeing, reproductive milestones and socioeconomic conditions all matter. Awareness and advocacy for comprehensive, gender-sensitive care are key.”

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Wellness

Resistance training has preventative effects in menopause, study finds

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Resistance training improves hip strength, balance and flexibility during menopause and may also improve lean body mass, research suggests.

A study of 72 active women aged 46 to 57 found those who completed a 12-week supervised programme saw greater gains than those who kept to their usual exercise routines.

None of the participants were taking hormone replacement therapy.

The supervised, low-impact resistance exercise programme focused on strength at the hip and shoulder, dynamic balance and flexibility.

Participants used Pvolve equipment, including resistance bands and weights around the hips, wrists and ankles, and also lifted dumbbells of varying loads.

Women in the resistance training group showed a 19 per cent increase in hip function and lower-body strength, a 21 per cent increase in full-body flexibility and a 10 per cent increase in dynamic balance, meaning the ability to stay stable while moving.

Those in the usual activity group did not show any significant improvements.

Previous studies have assessed the decline in lower limb strength and flexibility during menopause, but this is said to be the first study to compare the effect of resistance training on muscle strength and mass before, during and after menopause.

This was done by including participants in different phases of menopause rather than following the same participants over a long timeframe.

Francis Stephens, a researcher at the University of Exeter Medical School in the UK, said: “These results are important because women appear to be more susceptible to loss of leg strength as they age, particularly after menopause, which can lead to increased risk of falls and hip fractures.

“This is the first study to demonstrate that a low-impact bodyweight and resistance band exercise training programme with a focus on the lower limbs, can increase hip strength, balance, and flexibility.

“Importantly, these improvements were the same in peri- and post-menopausal females when compared to pre-menopausal females, suggesting that changes associated with menopause do not mitigate the benefits of exercise.”

Although one of the researchers sits on Pvolve’s clinical advisory board, the researchers said the company did not sponsor the study or influence its results.

Stephens added that any progressive resistance exercise training focused on lower-body strength is likely to yield the same results.

He said: “The important point is for an individual to find a type of exercise, modality, location, time of day etc., that is enjoyable, sustainable, and improves everyday life.

“The participants in the present study reported an improvement in ‘enjoyment of exercise,’ and some are still using the programme since the study finished.”

Kylie Larson, a women’s health and fitness coach and founder of Elemental Coaching, who was not involved in the study, said the results were compelling.

She said: “This is particularly exciting for those that tend to think of menopause as ‘the end’. The study proves that if you incorporate strength training you can still make improvements to your muscle mass and strength, which will also have a positive ripple effect to your ability to manage your body composition.

“In addition, staying flexible and being able to balance are both keys to a healthy and functional second half of life.”

Participants in the study did four classes a week for 30 minutes each session, but Larson said even half that amount of strength training can go a long way, particularly if you emphasise progressive overload, which means gradually increasing muscle challenge through more weight.

Larson said: “Gradually increasing the challenge is what drives real change.

“Lifting heavier over time is what builds strength, protects your bones, and keeps your body resilient through menopause and beyond.”

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