On the night that a silent movie won best film award at the Oscars I felt transported back to the very same era in Moscow. Stalinesque buildings, elegant cathedral-like metro system, and fur coats to keep off the bitter cold. But at the national paediatric meeting attended by 3000 from across this huge country, the talk was of innovation, new technology, and quality of life measures which were bang up to date. more…

Tomorrow I’m running a workshop for medical students at Imperial College London on medical journalism, and I thought it essential to include something on using and enjoying social media. I imagined that I would find dozens of guides on the web, but to my surprise I couldn’t find anything satisfactory. And much of what I did find was negative, warning medical students about the dangers of using social media. I thought that a great shame and misguided when social media become more important every day, so I thought I’d put together my own tips—and it’s clear that ten is the right number for tips. more…

This month we published a report on risk of type two diabetes in East London, with an accompanying paper in BMJ Open, and underpinned by a previous systematic review in BMJ. We took a risk scoring algorithm, the QDScore, and used it on just over half a million electronic records to identify high risk groups. QDScore is validated based on certain risk factors. For example, deprivation, body mass index, and certain ethnicities result in a higher score.   more…

You probably have not heard about the Tanzanian health strike, which has had a major impact on healthcare in the country recently. The strike, as far as I could gather was about pay. It seems that the new interns had not been paid for their first 3 months work and the government were also wishing to reduce the payments for on-calls, which as you can imagine was most unpopular. When I talked to one of our Tanzanian residents it seemed that the doctors wanted a 150% pay rise! With the advent of modern technology the strike was orchestrated by mobile phones and the doctors were informed whether they should attend work or not by text message. We found it quite confusing at the Regional Dermatology Training Centre (RDTC) as all the residents turned up for the 8am teaching lecture and then many disappeared before clinic or the ward round! After a week many of the nurses joined the strike as well. more…