National Leading Health and Wellbeing Programme 2013/14: From Transition to Transformation

Dear Colleague

Call for applications to join the national programme on 'Leading Health and Wellbeing from Transition to Transformation' (2013/14) starting November 2013

I write to invite you to nominate key senior staff in your organisation, partnerships or networks to join the National ‘Leading Health and Wellbeing Programme for 2013/14 - from Transition to Transformation’. 

Durham University, working Public Health England and a range of key partners, has designed this programme as one of a portfolio of Health and Wellbeing leadership programmes. Speakers on the one year programme will include a wide range of national experts in the fields of health and wellbeing improvement, leadership and system improvement methodologies, backed up with personal development tools, coaching and action learning support.

Attached to this email are further details of the programme which commences in November 2013.  Those taking part in it will be able to better understand the new public health system in England and hear about developments elsewhere in the UK.  They will also be able to  share progress, issues and aspirations around the shift of public health functions and services to local government, the implementation of Health and Wellbeing Boards, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Public Health England and Health Education England, as well as all other aspects of improving health and reducing health inequalities  at national and local levels.

Individual applications are very welcome, but for maximum benefit it is recommended that multiagency teams of 3-4 people working on a shared agenda from across local partnerships, in particular Health and Wellbeing Boards, apply to join the programme. A substantial discount applies to applications from teams of four or more.

This one year evidence-based leadership programme has now been well tested and externally evaluated, and has been run at both national and regional levels in association with the LGA.  It has been run across Yorkshire and Humberside, the North East, South Central, and has been run in Scotland with the support of NHS Scotland.  We are well aware of, and fully appreciate, the immense pressures and challenges arising from the present economic situation and from the major changes underway but, as I’m sure you’ll agree, we believe these developments make the need for such systems leadership programmes all the more timely and necessary. Leading in new ways beyond boundaries across places and systems is essential if limited resources are to have maximum impact in meeting the complex challenges facing those engaged in health improvement and wellbeing. 

The advisory board for the programme comprises a range of national organisations, with the programme serving as a platform for delivering key policy messages and developing leadership and improvement skills across the health and wellbeing community.  We have an extensive network of well over 600 senior individuals who have been through this one-year programme and who continue to be part of a national network of improvement leaders. 

Please do help spread the word about this programme by cascading the information through your local public health and partnership networks. The closing date for applications is 5pm Monday 30th September 2013.

Finally, do not hesitate to contact me directly (d.j.hunter at durham.ac.uk) or the Programme Director, Dr Catherine Hannaway (c.j.hannaway at durham.ac.uk), for further information or to answer any queries you may have. All details, including module dates, cost, eligibility criteria and an on-line application form can be found at: << Click Here >>

With kind regards, David 

David J Hunter

Professor of Health Policy and Management

School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health

Durham University

 

Michelle Cook
Programme Co-ordinator

Centre for Public Policy and Health

School of Medicine Pharmacy and Health

Durham University

Queen's Campus

Stockton-on-Tees

TS17 6BH

 

*: michelle.cook at durham.ac.uk

International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation: 2012 Report

IHTSDO CoP: 2012 Annual Activity Report Now Available

Our annual activity report for 2012 is now available in two formats:

Online magazine: www.ihtsdo.org/activity_report

PDF: www.ihtsdo.org/activity_report.pdf

We hope you enjoy it! Any comments or questions can be sent to info AT ihtsdo.org.

Source and many thanks to Juliet Krarup (ihtsdo staff)

NW England: 25th Apr - Help shape the future of the NHS: calling all students and professionals MBITS

At a recent health 2.0 meeting in Manchester, Sophie Dawes spoke about an initiative and meeting this Thursday evening.
I can't attend but offered to help spread the word so ... if you are in the NW. 
Even if you are not 'local' is this something you could try...?

Medical Business Innovation & Technology Society (MBITS) is a new student society that will be hosting its launch event!

Title: Help shape the future of the NHS: calling all students and professionals

*FREE ENTRY AND FREE FOOD*

Tickets are LIMITED - sign up on eventbite for FREE and receive free entry into the Virgin Active prize draw.

http://mbits.eventbrite.co.uk/ Date: 25th April Time: Registration opens at 6.15pm, talks start at 6.30pm. Venue: Uni Place Theatre A In association with: Manchester Medical School, Professor Freemont and Professor Townsend
The DOH have stated that innovation will play a key part in the future of the NHS. Could you be the next inventor? Have an idea you need help to develop/problem you want to solve? Want to start your own biomedical/medical business? Come and meet with like-minded individuals that could help make this a reality.

This event is open to anyone with a passion to improve patient care, not just medics! The event will cover:

• The importance of innovation and business in healthcare
• The role of medical company spin-offs
• Effective leadership and management in the medical industry
• The innovation process
• What is Intellectual property?

We are delighted to have secured 6 fantastic speakers who have a wealth of knowledge in these areas:

1. Professor Townsend: (Associate Dean for Business Engagement in the Health Faculties) http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=9169
2. Professor Freemont: (Head of Manchester Medical School)
3. Dr Magee (Chief Operating Officer at MAHSC): http://www.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/staff/LindaMagee/
4. Dr Maughfling: (UMIP) http://umip.com/umip-employees/
5. Dr John New (MIMIT site miner) http://www.spirehealthcare.com/manchester/our-facilities-treatments-and-consultants/our-consultants/dr-john-new/ : covering MIMIT and the innovation process
6. Mr Bibhas Roy (Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon – who pioneered PROMs 2.0): http://www.cmft.nhs.uk/trafford-hospitals/our-services/orthopaedics/mr-bibhas-roy.aspx

This is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about this important topic and socialise with like-minded individuals.

• Free entry 
• Free food and drink 
• Great chance to network with other students and professional
• Certificate of attendance for portfolio

Don't miss out!

3rd Int. Conference on Integrated Information: IC-ININFO, Prague Sept

Hi everyone!

I have been invited to Chair a session at the IC-ININFO 2013 conference in Prague in September and am now looking for abstracts by people interested in attending.

I am particularly interested in papers around sociotechnology or knowledge management. At this stage an abstract is required of around 250 words to me in the first instance and if I accept it, then it will go through the online review system. After acceptance of their abstract the authors have to prepare their Conference paper of up to 8 pages.

The paper submission will initiate a further single blind peer review process and the final paper will be published in the Conference Proceedings Book. More over, each author can submit a full paper to one of the supporting journals.

Please get in touch if you have an idea for this conference.

Elayne Coakes (Dr)
Senior Lecturer, Information and Knowledge Management
Room M112
The University of Westminster
coakese at WESTMINSTER.AC.UK

My source: SOCIOTECH at JISCMAIL.AC.UK

International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13) & Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

Call for Papers

5^th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13)

+

6^th International Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

Organized as One Full Day Workshop

Acronym: KR4HC’13 / ProHealth’13

Murcia, Spain –  June 1^st, 2013

In conjunction with the 14th Conference on
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME'13)

Web site: http://banzai-deim.urv.net/events/KR4HC-ProHealth-2013/

Important Dates

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 8 March 2013
Notification of Acceptance: 9 April 2013
Camera-ready version: 7 May 2013
KR4HC/ProHealth Workshop: 1 June 2013

Workshop Goals

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high quality services to their patients at affordable costs. These challenges become more prominent with the growth in the aging population with chronic diseases and the rise of healthcare costs. High degree of specialization of medical disciplines, huge amounts of medical knowledge and patient data to be consulted in order to provide evidence-based recommendations, and the need for personalized healthcare are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situation necessitates computer-based support of healthcare process & knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making.

This workshop brings together researchers from two communities who have been addressing these challenges from two different perspectives. The knowledge-representation for healthcare community, which is part of the larger medical informatics community, has been focusing on knowledge representation and reasoning to support knowledge management and clinical decision-making. This community has been developing efficient representations, technologies, and tools for integrating all the important elements that health care providers work with: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and healthcare information systems, clinical practice guidelines, and standardized medical vocabularies. The process-oriented information systems in healthcare community, which is part of the larger business process management (BPM) community, has been studying ways to adopt BPM technology in order to provide effective solutions for healthcare process management. BPM technology has been successfully used in other sectors for establishing process-aware enterprise information systems (vs. collections of stand-alone systems for different departments in the organization). Adopting BPM technology in the healthcare sector is starting to address some of the unique characteristics of healthcare processes, including their high degree of flexibility, the integration with EMRs and shared semantics of healthcare domain concepts, and the need for tight cooperation and communication among medical care teams.

This joint workshop brings together two approaches: healthcare process support, as addressed in previous ProHealth workshops, and healthcare knowledge representation as dealt with in previous KR4HC workshops. The workshop shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of the two approaches for supporting healthcare process & healthcare knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making. It shall further provide a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized knowledge-based clinical process support can be debated. We want to bring together researchers and practitioners from these different, yet similar fields to improve the understanding of domain specific requirements, methods and theories, tools and techniques, and the gaps between IT support and healthcare processes yet to be closed. This forum also provides an opportunity to explore how the approaches from the two communities could be better integrated.

History of the Joint Workshop 

Providing computer-based support in healthcare is a topic that has been picking up speed for more than two decades. We are witnessing a plethora of different workshops devoted to various topics involving computer applications for healthcare. Our goal has been to try to join forces with other communities in order to learn from each other, advance science, and create a stronger and larger community. In 2012, the two workshops, KR4HC and ProHealth held a joint workshop, which proved to be very successful. This year, we are aiming to continue the collaboration initiative and hold another joint workshop.

The two workshops have quite a long history, as briefly described below.

The first KR4HC workshop, held in conjunction with the 12th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine conference (AIME'09), brought together members of two existing communities: the clinical guidelines and protocols community, who held a line of four workshops (European Workshop on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols (CPG'2000, CPG'2004); AI Techniques in Health Care: Evidence-based Guidelines and Protocols 2006; Computer-based Clinical Guidelines and Protocols 2008) and a related community who held a series of three workshops / special tracks devoted to the formalization, organization, and deployment of procedural knowledge in healthcare (CBMS’07 Special Track on Machine Learning and Management of Health Care Procedural Knowledge 2007; From Medical Knowledge to Global Health Care 2007; Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures 2008). Since then, two more KR4HC workshops have been held, in conjunction with the ECAI’10 and the AIME’11 conferences.

The first ProHealth workshop took place in the context of the 5th Int’l Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) in 2007. The next three ProHealth Workshops were also held in conjunction with BPM conferences (BPM'08, BPM’09, and BPM’11). The aim of ProHealth has been to bring together researchers from the BPM and the Medical Informatics communities. As the workshop was associated with the BPM conference that had never been attended by researchers from the Medical Informatics community, we had included Medical Informatics researchers as keynote speakers of the workshop, members of the program committee, and to our delight, saw a number of researchers from the Medical Informatics community actively participating in ProHealth workshops. Following the keynote talk given by Manfred Reichert from the BPM community at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2011 (AIME’11) conference, where KR4HC was held, the organizers of ProHealth and KR4HC workshops have shown their interest to hold their workshops in conjunction as part of the BPM'12 conference, which marks a landmark in the collaboration between the two communities. We are continuing the efforts that started four years ago by members of the Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC) community to strengthen the collaboration between the ProHealth and SEHC communities.

Workshop Theme

Original contributions are sought, regarding the development of theory, techniques, and use cases of Artificial Intelligence and / or process management in the area of healthcare, particularly connected to patient data, clinical guidelines and healthcare processes.

Submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to the goals of the workshop. The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to the following areas:

• Process modeling in healthcare
• Computer-interpretable clinical guidelines / protocols and decision support
• Workflow management in healthcare
• Semantic integration of healthcare processes with electronic medical records
• Knowledge representation and ontologies for healthcare processes
• Temporal knowledge representations and exploitation
• Facilitating knowledge-acquisition of healthcare processes
• Visualization, monitoring and mining healthcare processes
• Knowledge extraction from healthcare databases and EPRs
• Knowledge combination, personalization and adaptation of healthcare processes
• Compliance of healthcare processes
• Evaluation of quality and safety of careflow systems
• Managing flexibility and exceptions in healthcare processes
• Process optimization and simulation in healthcare organizations and healthcare networks
• Experiences in deploying knowledge-based tools in healthcare
• Patient empowerment in healthcare
• Linking clinical care and clinical research
• Lifecycle management for healthcare processes
• Context-aware healthcare processes
• Ambient intelligence & smart processes in healthcare
• Mobile process support in healthcare
• Process interoperability & standards in healthcare
• Process-oriented system architectures in healthcare

Format of the Workshop

The 1-day workshop will comprise accepted long and short papers, tool presentations, and 1 keynote. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. An informal proceedings will be available during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper. The selected best long (full) papers will be included in the formal proceedings, which are expected to be published as part of the LNAI Springer series, as it was done in all previous editions of the workshop.

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Three types of submissions are possible: (1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting mature research results, (2) position papers reporting research that may be in preliminary stage not yet been evaluated, and (3) tool reports. Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.
Papers should be submitted in the LNCS format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper, position paper, or tool report). Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the Easychair system

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kr4hcprohealth2013.

Open access: everyone has the right to knowledge

SOURCE: The Conversation

By Alessandro Demaio, University of Copenhagen; Bertil Dorch, University of Copenhagen, and Fred Hersch, University of Sydney

This week, we celebrate open access week – an event aimed at bringing attention to this rapidly emerging form of scientific publication and its ethical imperatives.

Traditionally, knowledge breakthroughs and scientific discoveries are shared through publication in academic journals. Peer-reviewed and highly competitive, careers are made and broken on the number and impact of these publications.

With the complex, long-standing hierarchy of journal ranking, scientific publishing is big business. From a distance, one might assume that scientific publications aim to maximise the dissemination of ideas, break down barriers to science and make knowledge accessible to the masses – but this is not actually the case.

The publication process

When a scientist, whether in the field, the laboratory or the hospital, makes a discovery, she puts her ideas into an academic paper and submits it to a journal. The journal’s editors decide whether it’s relevant to the scope of the publication, and if it is, they (usually) send it on to a small group of the researcher’s peers.

These are other specialists in the field who will read and give feedback on the paper. If they think the work is worthwhile, and they have no changes to suggest (which is seldom), then the paper will be published in a future issue of that journal.

At this point, no one has paid for anything. The authors don’t pay to submit the article, the journal doesn’t pay for the scientists’ work and the peer reviewers are voluntary. Even the editors are often unpaid, unless they can integrate this service into their professional work.

Journals seek remuneration through subscriptions or once-off access fees by the user – often in the order of US$30 per paper. Those of us lucky enough to have an affiliation to a university, or live in Denmark where the government spends many millions on subscriptions for the entire population can access scientific knowledge free of charge.

Open access

Open access publication differs in one very important way from “traditional” academic publishing. Instead of the individual paying to access an article, or buying a subscription, researchers pay for the publication of their work, often out of their research funds.

In the order of US$1,000-$2,500 per publication, this article processing fee is payable when and if the paper is accepted – and it’s routinely waived for researchers from low and middle-income nations.
This means that while the editorial and peer review process are the same as above, access to the published work is free forever and available openly (hence, open access) online.

The traditional publishing paradigm can be regressive and exclusive. Think for a moment how it works: I am a researcher, I do research in developing countries. What if I was to go there; take the time, resources, ideas or even blood samples from thousands of local people; take the information back to my university; access all the scientific knowledge I need in order to develop the work; and then publish my findings in journals for which there’s an access fee of one week’s wages for the people involved in my study.

Sure I might be able to send them a copy, but for the vast majority of people in that community, science remains out of reach. Now, these study participants may also have no internet access for open access sourcing, but many now do and at least the barrier to knowledge is not put up by the scientific community itself.

Similarly, in high-income nations, it’s still the wealthy, the highly educated or those at higher-education institutions who have greatest access to the vast majority of published science. How is this just?

And what happens when we add an additional layer of ethical consideration: that these researchers and their work is often is paid for by society, by taxpayers, through public funding. How can we then justify publishing it in academic media inaccessible to the vast majority who paid for it?

We can’t just blame researchers or the research community for this – and we’re not saying that because we’re researchers. Academic performance and assessment, in the large part, is determined by the amount and impact of one’s publications. The older “traditional” journals have greater histories and so researchers are almost coerced into publishing with these journals.

Some good news

The good news is that things are changing. In the first decade of the 21st century, we have seen an explosion in open access publications. During this time, we’ve observed a ten-fold increase in publications (almost 200,000 at 2011) and more than a six-fold increase in the number of open access journals, to almost 5,000.

Things are clearly moving in the right direction, but this impressive number still accounts for only around 20% of all publishing.

Simultaneously, global leaders have acknowledged the ethical dilemmas of our current system and backed open access. The European Union, for example, is currently piloting a project to encourage all EU-funded research to place their results in an open-access repository or publish them in open access journals.

And some nations, including the United Kingdom, Denmark and Australia, are either planning or implementing policies making publication of publicly-funded research in open access journals mandatory.

The call for change is being echoed by the academic community, which is asking for greater open access and the removal of economic barriers to science.

Research should be about furthering knowledge for all. And there’s no reason why open access publication shouldn’t be routine.

There are also strong economic arguments for investing in a knowledge economy. We are confident that with enough support, we will see more nations, companies and organisations mandating open access publication – a move that’s likely to bring social and economic benefits.

And who knows, maybe we’ll also begin to see the “traditional” academic journals change their business model and one day make knowledge open to all.

Dr Alessandro Demaio is PhD Fellow in Global Health with the Copenhagen School of Global Health at the University of Copenhagen. In addition, he is a Director of the Global Steering Committee for the Young Professional Chronic Disease Network and NCD Action. For The Conversation, Alessandro expresses his own views only.
Bertil F. Dorch is currently senior executive adviser to the university librarian at Copenhagen University Library Services (part of The Royal Library, Denmark), and have previously been Head of Center for Research Support Services as well as a research scientist at University of Copenhagen (The Niels Bohr Institute), within the field of astrophysics.
Fred Hersch does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Integrated Health and Social Care Data: GIS torch

Last month the HSJ announced plans to integrated health and social care data (July 5th, pp. 6-7). The purpose is specific to support care commissioning, but ...

The related topic of integrated care is a round-robin element of policy debate. It may go quiet for a time, but it is there, needing to be fed in successive governmental and policy turns.

You might reasonably expect that integrated health and social care data, would be a by-product of integrated care. So the fact that data integration remains a 'to-do' demonstrates the patchwork nature of care integration and the many levels by which it can be defined: commissioning, practice (within domain) across care domains, budget, teams - disciplines, service organisations, care and education, public involvement and data. 

I hope the integration of health and social care data at the commissioning level might also put data into the hands of clinicians and social care teams - integrated of course!

The local insights that could flow would represent a real, tangible benefit. The news item stresses the potential value for commissioners. There are as ever several caveats:

• To what extent can health and social care staff influence the shape of the dataset?
• Is it crystallized (centralised) already?
• Can the new role for councils in public health finally ignite the GIS torch to illuminate what is really happening in the local community?

It happens that:

data 'integration' 

also = data 'orientating'

So - come on policy people, commissioners and managers, don't leave the workforce out of the loop. Staff on the ground are disoriented enough by the relentless pace of change. They need a sat-nav for care. Give them the torch they need.

What is that you say? They don't have the time to critique their (integrated) practice, to formulate their questions. And anyway - they don't have the access or the skills to use the informatics resources, let alone the nous to interpret the data! Well, if that is the case then shame on you.