Privatisation of the NHS
Good use of YouTube to explain the impact of the NHS White Paper. Deserves a wider audience. This comes from @richardblogger
Before the general election he made some other YouTubes. Unfortunately very few people saw them. The Conservative plans for the NHS: And the myth that the NHS is not productive.
NICE guidance. Is it inaccessible?
Yesterday, I was travelling back from a medical education conference in Cambridge with a GP colleague. He mentioned that in his GP surgery it took minutes to download the 'quick reference' PDFs of NICE guidance. He wondered if there couldn't be a one page summary as he currently felt that he didn't have access.
It's true. I don't think of NICE guidance as being accessible either. I wouldn't think of checking the NICE website near-patient. In the practice we try to review new NICE guidance as a group and incorporate it into our practice protocols. If new guidance is issued it should be possible to quickly check what has changed from the previous version so that we can consider how our practice protocol should be changing.
But at the moment that is not possible.
Liberating information from PDFs
My last post was about why emailing information in PDFs or documents was not a good way to help frontline staff manage information in the 21st century. But as well as emailing PDFs many organisations use their website to act as doc stores of PDF. I've also posted about how the Vaccination Team at the DOH lock useful information up in PDFs. But the DOH is not the only organisation doing this.
This is how my local trust provides me and the rest of the population, both health professionals and service users, with information about sexual health services. Yes, a link to a PDF. Not a calendar which would allow me to see when the next clinic is that will fit an IUD for emergency contraception. Not a map that would allow me to see which clinics are closest to the surgery. No, a PDF.
But then I came across Si Brownleader's map showing sexual health services in London. (He has made a few more great ones since that!) So I decided to try and liberate the information within the PDF about our local sexual health services. And here is the result:
View Contraception and Sexual Health Services in Gwent in a larger map
#hyperlocalhealth information is important. But so to is information at a national level. Please think about how you are sharing information online. Could you make it easier for frontline staff to organise and share your content? If you want to do that then uploading PDFs to your website is not a good way to start.
Why emailing PDFs and documents to frontline staff is a problem.
GP practices get emailed a lot of documents which are very, very large files but maybe only a few hundred words long. They contain logos and signatures and they fill up inboxes. In fact this has become such a problem that emails which need to get through are bouncing from over-full email accounts.
A recent newsletter from the LMC gives the following advice:
"Very often it is a question of deleting items in the ‘deleted’ box, and ‘sent’ items, as well as filing those items that are to be kept on the main computer – quite time consuming, but it does help! "
But this doesn't sound like a very modern way to manage information. When I need information that has been sent to the practice I don't want to have to search for the PDF or Word document that contains it. I don't want it to have been filed in our 'main computer'.
We don't have to be sent copies of the documents as if email was a postal service. Emailing a link to the document would be perfectly acceptable. Put the documents on Scribd and embed them in your website. Or don't put the information in a document at all. If it is a newsletter then start a blog. Tag your entries. Enable RSS feeds. Let me help you to distribute your content instead of stuffing our inboxes with something I can't easily share or find again.
The DOH are at it too.
This PDF with useful information on vaccines was also taking up quite a lot of space in my inbox. There are lots of links in here and it seems that it would be very sensible for this document to be online in a format other than a PDF. But it looks as if the DOH have been doing it this way for quite a long time.... http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publichealth/Immunisation/Vaccineupdate/index.htm
There must be a better way than this. Is there?
I've been tidying my inbox and noticed that one email contained 2 very big files. The files were a Welsh and English version of a word document which is a newsletter from the Chronic Health Strategy team of the Welsh Assembly Government. There is some really good information in there on a very important topic but this is not a good way to share information.
It would be so much more useful if the information in this document was instead online in a series of blog posts. I could bookmark the posts and easily find them again. But a large Word document in my email will just be deleted.
Although the document makes reference to versions of it being available and downloadable online there is no link given, and the only presence I can find of the Chronic Health Division Strategy is http://wales.gov.uk/topics/health/nhswales/healthstrategy/?lang=en.
I have emailed them with my suggestion but I'm not sure that the Welsh Assembly Government government does blogs.
Just my thoughts.
PS I hadn't realised that Posterous used Scribd to host documents. Now there is an online version!
