Imperial College London Primary Care

On behalf of the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College, I would like to congratulate the players and staff of our local football team, Chelsea FC , for winning the "Double". Winning both the Premier League title and the FA Cup in the same season is a tremendous achievement. The way in which premier league footballers keep themselves fit and healthy through their carefully planned programme of exercise and diet is a great example to people of all ages. We are facing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes brought about through high-calorie diets and a lack of exercise. Let's hope that more people will try to follow the example of our local footballers and aim to keep themselves in good physical shape.

This week's seminar was given by Professor Derek Bell, who spoke on the NW London CLAHRC programme. The North-West 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. Patients expect high standards of care and treatment wherever and whenever they access the NHS. There is a need for new evidence to be implemented more rapidly to deliver better care and better outcomes. The Cooksey report identified the implementation of new products and approaches into clinical practice as the second gap in the translation of health research and called for a systematic approach to the adoption of new interventions. The High Level Group Report on Clinical Effectiveness (2007) identified a number of the challenges facing the successful implementation of effective and efficient clinical care. These include iden...

Today's seminar was given by Dr Veena Raleigh from the Kings Fund. A summary of Dr Raleigh's presentation is given below. Quality has been at the centre of recent NHS policy, and the NHS Next Stage Review highlighted the role of information and measurement in supporting quality improvement, particularly in relation to patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience. It is therefore important to be clear how quality can be measured and by whom – and how the information can be used to improve services. If quality measurement is going to have greatest impact, all those involved – policy-makers, commissioners, board members, managers and clinicians – need to be aware of the opportunities and challenges it presents. Understanding how to produce good indicators of quality is only the first step; what is critical is having systems in place to make use of the information to improve patient care. This will be particularly important in the current economic climate, which pu...

This Week's Seminar will be given by Dr Veena Raleigh from the Kings Fund. Dr Raleigh will speak on Quality Measurement: the potential and the perils . The seminar will be held on on 28th April 2010 at 12.30pm in the Seminar Room, 3rd Floor, Reynolds Building, Charing Cross Campus. All welcome.

An opportunity has arisen for either a Research Assistant or Research Associate to join an international/cross-discipline team creating a rapid learning health care system to improve patient safety and volume of clinical research in Europe. This is an exciting opportunity for an individual with a keen interest in data mining and/or data provenance who is looking to gain experience in medical informatics. The aim of the research is to design and develop an extensible provenance framework to be integrated into the decision support and data mining engines to ensure auditability and accountability. This position will be responsible for investigating existing provenance models and their applicability to data mining tasks and contributing to the development of novel data mining models for translational data. See the Imperial College Recruitment Page for further details.

Imperial College allows all staff members to keep web pages on the Imperial College website to store information about professional activities. As examples, you can view my Imperial College page and my Imperial College Publications page.

It was with great sadness that we learned about the recent death of Professor Konrad Jamrozik. Konrad Jamrozik was Professor of Primary Care Epidemiology at Imperial College London from 2001-2004. He then returned to Australia. His most recent post was as Head of the School of Population Health and Clinical Practice at the University of Adelaide. Professor Jamrozik won a number of awards during his career, most recently, the Nigel Gray Award for Achievement in Tobacco Control.