NHS use of kilograms
Although the NHS uses grams and kilograms, the media often dumb down the information, and politicians do nothing to help [article by Roz Denny]
Last week I went to see the GP for my elderly father and she was pleasantly surprised when discussing his weight that she didn’t have to ‘translate’ it for me from kg to stones. I am also of the generation of women who gave birth 28 years ago in an NHS hospital and was handed my little bundle at 3.1kg, no conversions. Thereafter my baby’s weights were entered in her clinic record book in kg, albeit with lbs in brackets. Since those heady days we’ve seemed to gone backwards. Even to the extent that the media think all UK babies are weighed in lbs at birth particularly the babies of prominent politicians - Blair, Brown and Cameron.
December 21st, 2006 at 13:28
I would love to know just how the media decide what units to use. My GP is metric. My gym is metric, and when weight and fitness issues come up at my martial arts class everyone is talks in metric. Yet women’s magazine seem totally unable to get beyond the “stone” when planning their front cover.
In the same way every christmas we are told the most popular baby names of the year, perhaps the NHS could start issuing a yearly chart of lightest/average/heaviest baby weights for the year (in metric of course) and see what response the media gives it.
December 21st, 2006 at 16:09
I too think we have gone backwards. I was appalled by the experience I had at my local hospital two years ago when a nurse weighed me in kg and proceeded to convert to stones and pounds in spite of my attempt to reassure her it wasn’t necessary.
It got worse at the next visit when another nurse weighed me again. The same thing, she spent some time converting and then set about calculating my weight loss in pounds!
It irritates me further that whenever people talk about weight gain or loss in imperial they never stop to consider it percentage terms (which is not easily worked out in stones and pounds), which is often much more significant as a guage in weight change. Indeed a GP at my local practice told me recently that high blood pressure tends to reduce by 10% for every 10% of weight loss!
January 8th, 2007 at 15:22
I have been present at the birth of all 4 of my children between 1996 and 2003. In all four cases (covering two different hospitals) the children were weighed in kg, but the weights converted to imperial measures before we were told. Even when I got the official weights and told friends and family, they all wanted me to convert them back to imperial again. The British public are wilfully ignorant and innumerate.
January 17th, 2007 at 12:24
A year or so ago, I read a press report that suggested that about 25 000 babies die each year in the USA because of medical errors.
Many of these unnecessary deaths are brought about because medicines are given in units like milligrams per kilogram of the baby’s mass but the parents don’t know the mass of their baby in kilograms because it was dumbed down by the hospital staff.
I have been known to ask the ‘down-dumbers’ in the hospital, “How many babies do you think are harmed each year by your silly pounds and ounces?”
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia