Posted by dapo on Jan 27, 2010 in
NHS,
Talking point I have about staff levels within Pathology for the last couple months. The trigger for my train of thought was the news that nurses will have to get a degree. The initial concerns were that degree educated nurses would not want to get their hands dirty doing the routine tasks in the job. It seems that Wales have already made the nursing profession a degree level profession. And it seems that concerns about ‘too posh to wash‘ have not materialised.
Read more…
Tags: BMS, degree, nurses, too posh to wash
Posted by dapo on Jun 12, 2009 in
CPD,
Good sites,
Journals,
Talking point I have been looking at my training site and updating a few things and in the process I have found several sources of podcasts! The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has an audio podcast as well as some vidoes.
Also, I found the the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, the people behind the Clinical Chemistry journal, provide a podcast.
I think its great that these heavy journals are providing this kind of content. I have download a few episodes and will aim to listen whilst going to and from work next week. Hope to provide some feedback soon.
Tags: AACC, BMJ, Clinical Chemistry, moodle, mp3, Podcast
Posted by dapo on Jun 12, 2009 in
Talking point I am currently working in a section with lots of HPLC equipment. We have recently had the pleasure of several work experience people come and visit our lab and I was asked to show one of these people what I was doing. I was in the middle of prepearing to do a batch of vitamins A & E for analysis.
I explain what I was doing during the preperation, then I described the equipment I was about to use to perform the analysis, a HPLC system. I pointed out the basic elements of the system, pump, column etc and I then pointed out the same elements in the other HPLC systems in the section, including the same elements in the tandem mass spec.
Thinking about this experience reminded me about a picture I had prepared for training purposes of a HPLC system with labels pointing out the various elements. I thought this image would be useful for other people to use for training purposes also. I have included a labelled and unlabelled version for people to download and use.
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Tags: download, experience, HPLC, training, work
Posted by dapo on Aug 6, 2008 in
Medical,
Talking point This is an interesting use of maggots. I have heard of the use of maggots at removing dead tissue etc but to collect the secretions to use as a potential antibiotic is an interesting proposition.
Tags: antibiotics, BBC, maggots, MRSA
Posted by dapo on Mar 21, 2008 in
Talking point I saw this page on the BBC Health page. It suggests that the use of abbreviations should be potentially phased out as it has contributed to 5% of errors in an American study, some of which were fatal. An example quoted in the article concerns the dose of insulin given to a patient. The notes had 6IU, which was interpretated as 61 units and not the actual 6 International Units. It does make for some interesting reading.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7171453.stm
Tags: abbreviations, BBC, medical risk, notes
Posted by dapo on Mar 4, 2008 in
Talking point I have been having a re-think about this site. I’m not too sure what direction I want it to go in at the moment but I will be making slight improvements over time whilst thinking about the future. One change will be my use of tags on enteries so people can look at related articles.
Tags: future, site, tags
Posted by dapo on Jun 2, 2007 in
CPD,
Chemistry,
Medical,
Talking point The laboratory I work in has recently seen a very unusual potassium result. During the afternoon, one of our consultants came across a high potassium result, 13.4, that he suspected might be an EDTA contaminated sample.
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Tags: potassium, Talking point
Posted by dapo on Jun 2, 2007 in
Medical,
Talking point This article appeared on the BBC website. As an expectant father, I gave it a read and found it quite interesting. It seems remarkable that such a small thing can profoundly influence the decision process.
Tags: BBC, Talking point
Posted by dapo on May 27, 2007 in
Talking point It seems the Americans have been looking at various different countries and their health systems. They have concluded that the US is the the worst or second worse on the various different parameters used. According to this survey, the best health system was the NHS. I must read the full report to find out how this was managed. The full report can be found at:
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/usr_doc/Davis_mirrormirrorinternationalpdate_1027.pdf?section=4039
Tags: NHS, UK, US
Posted by dapo on May 22, 2007 in
Good sites,
Talking point Found this site which looks at some unusual medical conditions.
http://medtempus.com/archives/top-10-weird-anomalies-in-medicine/
Tags: Medical