Showing posts with label doctors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label doctors. Show all posts

Thursday, 17 July 2014

The Global Health Research Process Map

As a conceptual ready reckoner Hodges' model helps us locate, isolate and contextualise the commonly cited 4Ps. In the h2cm matrix below I have related the 4Ps, as before, to the four care domains:
individual
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
group
PURPOSEPROCESS
PRACTICEPOLICY

I raise this learning of a new process oriented resource for global research produced by The Global Health Network.

Processes are critical.  

Think of the relationship of purpose, practice and policy in relation to triage and emergency care? When I reflect on a situation even if the priority, context is process driven I am mindful of the bigger picture.

+++++++++++++++

The Global Health Network has launched a brand new, interactive Global Health Research Process Map, the first digital toolkit designed to enable researchers anywhere in the world to initiate rigorous global health research studies.

As the HIFA community know all too well, health research is often lacking in the regions where evidence to improve health is needed most. Crucial evidence is not being generated because doctors and nurses lack access to training, information, and support. Effort is also regularly duplicated or conducted using different criteria in different territories and studies, and sometimes it falls by the wayside from lack of simple resources and guidance on best practice. The Global Health Research Process Map (http://processmap.org/) is set to change this. It’s an open-access internationally-available online resource that guides every process and method needed to initiate a health research study. For each step researchers and their staff are provided with the information, support and training that they need to successfully run a health study. Researchers will also gain the opportunity to engage with their peers along the way, aiding collaboration and the spread of ideas.

The Process Map was released just over one week ago, and has already generated nearly 2,500 views from around the world. It is the product of four years of best practice gathered and refined by the research community who use the pioneering Global Health Network to guide and support their effort to conduct research in challenging settings. The Global Health Network works like an online science park for exchanging knowledge, sharing research methods and facilitating collaboration among global health professionals to fuel faster and better evidence to improve health. The Global Health Network facilitates global partnerships between researchers ­ allowing researchers in low-resource settings and those with more support to learn from each other ­ and conduct research studies in places where this is difficult and unusual.

The Process Map is a pioneering research tool that centralises the information and resources that researchers anywhere in the world need to develop and initiate rigorous and effective global health studies. It has the potential to revolutionise the current process, speeding the development of new drugs and vaccines, and improving how diseases are managed. With this toolkit, researchers can access the guidance, training and support that they need in order to run their own studies. This is important because there is much evidence that shows that locally-led research rarely happens in low-income settings because health workers lack research skills and any access to training and support. Therefore the Global Health Network is meeting that gap and the Global Health Research Process Map will take them through the process of conducting accurate research, step-by-step. 

Visit the tool today, and click on each node to access formally written information, links to eLearning courses, guidance articles, discussions, blogs, up-to-date news, and all sorts of tools and templates which will help you complete each step. As with everything else on the Global Health Network, it’s completely free and open-access, and always will be. Your feedback is always greatly appreciated, so feel free to have a look and leave comments, either here* or on the map itself.

Thank you!
Tamzin

Tamzin Furtado
Project Manager
The Global Health Network

*My source: HIFA2015
 

Friday, 4 October 2013

Thursday, 3 October 2013

two books two islands two doctors - beyond a cappuccino

My uncle Doug (I do miss him) mentioned a book to me when I was some time around 1974. I think I found a copy in their bookcase when the whole family used to visit on a Sunday afternoon.
A decade later 1983, the year before I got married I visited Sorrento and during this holiday took a day trip to Capri.

With my fiancé I found myself walking around the Villa San Michele. The book was The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe. I don’t recall consciously deciding to go to Anacapri, but I found myself there. It really made an impression on the 24 year old. What an amazing place to be, study, to try to be creative if not grandiose.

I’m sure I read the book after this visit, it dawning on me that this was - not just - that place, but the story too.

In between on holiday in Kefalonia in 1995 and read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin while there. Axel Munthe was a doctor and there’s a doctor in de Bernières’ book.

Two islands, two doctors, two books: fact and fiction and the spaces in between.

Thirty years later it was a lovely experience to take the bus to Anacapri this September and spend some time at San Michele.

Now the mix of history and styles is a bit jarring, but it is still, for me at least, an amazing space to be. The views of the Bay of Naples are stunning.

The light, the air, the sky.

Inspirational.

At some point if I could spend some time there, beyond a cappuccino...


The Bay of Naples - Vesuvius from San Michele 4 Sept 2013

literatureandmedicine

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Health in the Round - A paper Griffiths et al. ...

The quote below from Griffiths et al. highlights what might be described as health in the round. As the authors address: the rapid growth of online social networking for health, health care systems are experiencing an inescapable increase in complexity - they contrast disease-centred health care with patient-centred. In so doing they distinguish the mechanistic tendencies in health care systems with the humanistic. For me reading this section of the paper was a circumnavigation of health and social care domains of Hodges' model:
Good communication between doctors and patients has been widely recognised by professional bodies in North America (AAMC, 1999) and Europe (GMC, 2009) as essential to the delivery of health care and appears to contribute to healing (Street, Makoul, Arora, & Epstein, 2009). Stewart (2001) has argued for a shift away from disease-centred biomedicine to a more holistic patient-centred alternative. This approach encompasses: exploring the patient’s reason for consulting; developing an understanding of their context; finding common ground in problem characterisation and management; supporting health promotion; and enabling the doctor-patient relationship to continue (Stewart et al., 2003). Patient-centred practice reflects (Bensing, 2000) a set of social and political ideas about the nature of the doctor patient relationship (Mead & Bower, 2000), which, it could be argued, forms a complex system (Situngkir, 2004). p.2237.

Griffiths, F., Cave, J., Boardman, F., Ren, J., Pawlikowska, T., Ball, R., Clarke, A., Cohen, A. (2012). Social networks - The future for health care delivery. Social Science & Medicine. 75: 2233-2241.

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

RFID Tags Track Possible Outbreak Pathways in the Hospital

There is no substitute for providing evidence that confirms many common-sense assumptions about what happens in the clinical environment that is the ward - in this case paediatrics.

See the links below for details and explanation.

My source: John Matson. Graphic Science. Scientific American, November 2012, page 76.
See also the original PLoS ONE paper.