Imperial College London Primary Care

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.

Ms Joanna Murray, a PhD student in the department, has been awarded a place on the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres Summer School for PhD Students.

Students from the MPH and MSc Modern Epidemiology have started the International Public Health Group to improve awareness and discussion of global health issues. The group will also provide opportunities to learn about international projects and organizations. For example, with the help of Professor Salman Rawaf, the group has arranged a visit to the WHO Headquarters in Geneva. In addition to sessions with Professor Rawaf, the group has also organised sessions with Professor Alan Fenwick and Dr Edwin Michaels from the Department of Infectious Diseases Epidemiology.