Medical Centre

A paper published in PLoS One by Dr Min Hua Jen and colleagues (including myself) in PLoS One investigated the commonly held assumption that early August is an unsafe period to be admitted to hospital in England, as newly qualified doctors start work in NHS hospitals on the first Wednesday of August. We found evidence that this might indeed be the case and that patients admitted on this day have a slightly higher death rate in English hospitals compared with patients admitted on the previous Wednesday. This finding needs further investigation to understand why it is present, whether it is real, or somehow an artifact of the data. The article was widely featured in the media, including the BBC and Guardian .

I attended the Annual Conference of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). This was held in Madrid, Spain, from September 16-19 2009. I spoke at a session chaired by Professor Yi-Ming Chen from the National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan. Also speaking in this session was Dr Dietlind Wünsche from the University of Heidelberg Office of International Relations, Germany. Our session was titled Creating networks for health care programmes and students . We shared experience about setting up international collaborations for academics and students. I also spoke about the work of the International Education Fund, which is a student group that brings educational opportunities to children in developing countries. Following my session, I had an opportunity to visit the exhibition hall and speak to representatives from a number of universities, including Sweden, Norway, Poland, Germany and Taiwan. I was impressed by the high-quality of the courses offered by many of these uni...

One of the projects I am working on is the Northwest London Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research & Care (CLAHRC). The NW London CLAHRC is an alliance of academic and healthcare organisations working to develop and promote a more efficient, accelerated and sustainable uptake of clinically innovative and cost-effective research interventions into patient care. The CLAHRC is led by Professor Derek Bell, Professor of Acute Medicine at Imperial College, and is based at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. My role in CLAHRC is as co-director, with lead responsibility in primary care and public health projects.

I attended a very interesting workshop today on iHealth , an EPSRC-funded project. Academics from Imperial College (Institute of Bioengineering, Department of Primary Care & Social Medicine, Department of Computing, Business School, Division of Surgery, Oncology, Reproductive Medicine & Anaesthesia) presented work from a pilot project in which we examined the use of information technology and electronic patient records to optimise chronic disease management.