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The end of the beginning

4th week – Last week! – Evaluation week

 WaHH logo full colour (compressed)

 

 

21/07/2014 – Monday

  • Volunteer interview.
  • Processing and response to new volunteer applications
  • Excel database update of all the volunteers.
  • Review and evaluation of the festival – what went well and worked/not so good/things to improve in future festivals.
  • Most importantly after 3 full weeks here – I had a meeting with the project manager Rachel about the structure of the project – drawing up a diagram of all the roles needed to be filled – what they each involve and how they link. Vital for the organisation to be sustainable for the future.
  • We also went over the goals and aims from the 1st week and saw what was achieved in my role of volunteer coordinator in management.

 

22/07/2014 – Tuesday

  • Evaluation/review day
  • Posting new advertisement for a new coordinator role after I leave.
  • Completing my own evaluation/diary of my role.
  • Contacting volunteers by phone and email for future interviews.
  • Database sheet entry for volunteer hours and evaluations.
  • Evaluation and review of the review survey completed for the inactive volunteers.
  • Planning out a plan template for an induction day for a new volunteer coordinator candidate – as I will be training them on Wednesday.

 

23/07/2014 – Wednesday

  • All day – Induction training day with new volunteer coordinator
  • Also an interview for potential volunteer
  • Phone and email correspondence with other potential volunteers.
  • Volunteer application processing.

 

24/07/2014 – Thursday

  • Volunteer application responses via phone/email etc
  • Long Evaluation form questions to fill in for the festival on Sunday using all the volunteers feedback answers.
  • Snake surveying forms data input.
  • Creating a monthly newsletter.
  • Assisting on a plant foraging walk on the Heath- 2.30 hours long with a group of 30 people attending.
  • Interview for a new volunteer.

 

Evening at the Heath
Evening at the Heath

25/07/2014 – Friday – last day!!!!!

 

So this is it – my internship finished. What a great experience!!!!! I have learnt so much – met soo many people, creatures and wildlife- and achieved a lot in terms of the skills and roles and goals.

Thanks both to the Charity Insights team and  to everyone with RSPB Wild About Hampstead Heath ( i.e. Rachel more specifically) for this more than wonderful opportunity.

 

Second week with CWT

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The start of my second week with Cornwall Wildlife Trust and I picked straight up from where I had left the project on Friday afternoon, following the first consultation with a renewable installation consultant. The consultation raised questions from both sides and I began to find the answers to the consultant’s and relay them to him. I got access to recent electricity and fuel invoices for the various buildings at the reserve, where I am based. With the recent invoices I began to log and manipulate the energy data to provide information requested by the consultant, and to try and determine the thermal energy demands of the site; attempting to identify what portion of electrical demand was used for space heating.

Tuesday, and I continued analysing the data I had been working on the day before. I looked in more detail at the Government’s Renewable Heat Incentive scheme and developed a spreadsheet to quickly calculate the expected returns for various installation and operation scenarios. The intention is to optimise the chosen renewable installation to maximise payments to the Trust for operating the system. I also researched the likely maintenance requirements for an installation and acquired quotes for annual servicing to include this in costing the project.

The second, of four, renewable installation consultations was arranged for Wednesday morning. It was interesting to hear other ideas and discuss the project with another specialist, with different opinions. Questions were again raised which I set about answering. I spent the afternoon looking again at the UK energy statistics I had gathered last week. I attempted to develop some idea of expected future trends in energy markets so as to include some information on likely future electricity and fuel prices.

Example energy statistics data
Example energy statistics data

The first two consultations had been really useful and having questions ready to ask, and discuss, with the consultants had been a big part of this. I had another consultation arranged for Thursday, and the final one on Friday afternoon, so I tried to ensure that I thought of everything I would like to ask over the next couple of days. Between consultations I began to compile the report that will document everything I do on the project and be the final deliverable at the end of the four weeks. I summarised some of the research I had performed in the previous week to provide a quick background on the motivation for the project.

The second week over, and halfway through the project. Another productive week, the project is progressing well and I feel well placed to continue working on it next week.

Example of potential installation site plan
Example of potential installation site plan

Week one draws to a close

My first week at St. Anne’s is (prematurely, for this week anyway!) over, and already I feel like I’ve learnt a huge amount.

Arriving at the breakfast club on Tuesday morning, in all honesty I was terrified. I was convinced no one would want to be screened for cognitive impairment while they were having their breakfast! But as soon as I arrived the staff made me feel very welcome, and went out of their way to make sure I felt comfortable. It was important to ensure that the service users felt at ease with me, so for a while I just helped out serving tea and toast, chatting to the people who came in. Through this (and the posters I’d designed earlier in the week) I managed to talk about my project with some of the services users, who agreed to be screened. The results of the screening are confidential and so can’t be discussed here, but I will say that they were fascinating. Some of the service users screened even agreed to be screened again at different times, to see how their result changed.

After Tuesday’s unexpectedly productive start, I felt really positive about the results of my project. But, as is usually the way, later on in the week the nature of my project again posed more challenges for me. We’ve been blessed with some beautiful weather over the past few days (even up North) which means that most of the homeless men at Holdforth Court (the hostel where I am carrying out the majority of my screening) were out enjoying the sunshine like the rest of the world. Today, for example, I didn’t manage to screen anyone at all! It is frustrating, but I chose this project because I enjoy a challenge. If the heatwave continues I’ll have to come up with new ways to attract attention to my screening programme. Despite a few setbacks, I’ve definitely learnt a lot this week. I feel much more confident interacting with the service users, and ready for whatever next week throws at me!

For now, though, I’m finishing a little early this week to head down to Brighton to take part in the Trailwalker: The Challenge 2014 for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust this weekend. Wish me luck!!

Rethought Mental Illness

I can hardly believe that today is my second last day. On one hand, the last four weeks have flown by incredibly fast, and on the other hand, it feels like I’ve always worked here.

This last week has certainly been eventful! My survey (which was originally meant to go online last Thursday, then Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) is now being promoted through Facebook and Twitter! As you can see, it was being pushed to the next day a number of times – that is because Rethink tries to limit its activity on social media, especially Facebook, so that each individual post gets enough attention. So for almost a week, it seemed as though there was nothing to be done about the survey – until an hour before it did actually go out, I got feedback from the Associate Director and changed a lot of the wording. Additionally, technology failed me (I am even worse at it than I thought, apparently), and the link we passed on to other charities was broken – and ended up on Twitter for about an hour.

So, as you can see – the last few hours before getting the survey online were actually quite hectic. You can imagine my reaction when, after 3.5 weeks of re-phrasing and re-ordering, I saw my survey being promoted online! For the rest of the afternoon, I was sitting in front of the screen, watching the numbers go up – by the end of the day, I had 300 responses, and two other major charities haven’t even started promoting it yet! With their help, I am optimistic that after 3 weeks we will have 1000+ responses.

I think at this point it is only appropriate that I advertise it! If you or somebody you care for has accessed mental health care from their GP, please tell us what needs to change here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/538RYW2 !

I am going to analyse these results mid-August, when – unfortunately – I won’t be working at the Rethink office anymore. The findings are going to (hopefully) inform them about specific changes people would find useful, and Rethink can base their campaigns around those. So, if everything goes as planned, my work and your potential contribution will have a long term effect, and can direct help direct mental health care in a positive direction.

I will leave here tomorrow with a feeling of fulfilment. I learned and did more than I could have hoped for during my time at Rethink. The last four weeks have not only informed me about everything that is going wrong in mental health care, but also inspired me to work on that. I have come across so many people who have an interest in mental health – colleagues at Rethink, campaigners with lived experience, doctors, carers, and more – and it is fantastic to see how passionate people are about this topic, once they overcome the stigma that is, unfortunately, still attached to it.

I am, now even more than four weeks ago, considering psychiatry as a field I would like to work in; in this sense it might have a major effect on me beyond the scope of the internship. I cannot recommend Charity Insights strongly enough to everyone; it gives you the opportunity not only to choose a field that you are passionate about, but also to work for a charity, which is completely different (and of course much better) than working for a for-profit company!

Thank you for accompanying me in this, and I hope my blog inspired you to rethink mental illness.

Week 3 – Derbyshire Wildlife Trust

Last week was another amazing week full of fantastic experiences. I’m struggling to believe my placement is almost over.431934_4202912757663_1251155696_n
Been so busy over the past week getting involved in many different activities, as I mentioned in my last post on Saturday the 19th I went to a small mammal trapping event which was a lot of fun, we basically used traps in order to get statistical values for the numbers of small mammals in an area of woodland. It was a great experience.

Later on in the week, I worked with a few more school groups, running various activities which I now feel confident leading. I also was able to view some other activities schools can get involved with for example measuring river depths and speeds in order to see weather it’d be a suitable habitat for a water vole which is a species the wildlife trust is particularly concerned about.

On Wednesday and Thursday I was involved with working with the midweek volunteers in order to see what conservation work the wildlife trust actively does while running their nature reserves. On Wednesday we went to a woodland nature reserve to clear invasive none native species in order to allow succession of outcompeted native species and on Thursday we cleared a footpath. Although it has been good to experience other departments within the wildlife trust I have to admit I have much preferred working with the education department and raising awareness for the charity than working in hands on conservation work.

Over the weekend I was needed to help run a stall at a local event, to raise awareness for the trust by providing various activities for families to get involved with,  it was good fun and its really satisfying knowing that a lot of money and awareness is being raised for a good cause.

The first three weeks of the internship have gone so fast, I’ll be really sad to finish and say goodbye to my colleagues at the end of next week.

 

 

Infrastructure and I: Part One – Getting Acquainted

Emerging from the underground and into the buzz of people that is Victoria station at 9 am, I did not know what to expect from the day. Spotting a familiar looking piece of scaffolding, I let out a sigh of relief – at least I was walking in the right direction. Indeed, it was the same construction site I had been circling around for ages a few months earlier when making my way to the office of Green Alliance for my interview. Finding that white door tucked next to a screaming red cafe proved to be a much simpler task the second time around, and I was happy to tick the box found in many first day guides: arrive 15 minutes early.

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Green Alliance is an environmental think-tank aiming to stimulate green ideas and debate amongst businesses, politicians, and other NGOs alike. Most concrete examples of the organization’s work are the variety of events organized to spur discussion on environmental questions, and reports that often delve deeper into the numerical side of these issues. During my internship I will be working under the Sustainable Economy department, which strives to highlight that green economic development is not only “ethically” right but also economically sensible in the long run.

A major part of the sustainable economic development is played by good infrastructure planning. (See Green Alliance blog) Once erected, power stations and transport links tend to be in place for decades to come. To meet the emission targets first of which are coming up in 2020, right policies and investments have to be made today. My project will revolve around the National Infrastructure Plan, a 150-page official publication explaining what, when and with whose money new civil engineering works will be carried out in the next five years. A good starting point was to dissect the data that underlies the decisions set out in the plan.

Thus far, I have become well acquainted with the archives of the Office for National Statistics, Eurostat and OECD, scouring for data under headings such as infrastructure or civil engineering, and normalising them with respect to currency, inflation, and other factors. I have also taken first steps to familiarise myself with the way the data is gathered and processed. Knowledge of such metadata plays an important role when trying to explain the discrepancies in the data from different sources.

Now, for some people the description above might sound like something that would lull you into sleep the second you step into the office and open that Excel spreadsheet. I, however, have really enjoyed working on this project. From my perspective, every time series I deal with is an encrypted story of the real economy, just waiting to be interpreted. Safe to say I am looking forward to following weeks when we turn our attention to the future and assess how projects in the Infrastructure Pipeline match up against emission targets. Because of my part-time working schedule the next blog post (with more pictures I promise!) will unfortunately not be until mid-August, so sit tight until then!

Week 2: Setting up a local (offline) server and getting to grips with web programming

My second week started off by investigating the same Formhub instance set-up on a virtual Linux machine using Oracle’s VirtualBox. The reason for this is to enable the uploading off the surveys to the Linux server without the use of internet i.e. by means of a Local Area Network.  This proved to be more difficult then the previous week’s case of setting it up using Amazon’s AWS services since it needs more tweaking and it is a newer method which still needs some debugging. Having said that I am getting quite close to completing the set-up except for occasional connectivity issues and disappointingly low speeds for a LAN based system. (All the SSHing however has led me to getting the old Raspberry Pi out of the cupboard in order to check out new projects I could do over the holidays rather than just sticking with the media centre).

In addition to this, I spent a significant time on Codecademy learning html, css and javascript. This will be necessary in order to help with the creating dashboards using the information from Philippines’ surveys. We are looking to demo it on Wednesday in fact so we are expecting more requests by the end of the week. An example screenshot of what the dashboard will look like is below. However, all the segments of the charts and map are click able which in turn populates the rest of the diagrams accordingly.

dashboard
An example dashboard

 

I have started narrowing my learning to this specific case and deciphering the code in order to hopefully create similar things in the next few days.

Week 1 at the PHG Foundation; a science and health policy think-tank

PHG-Foundation-Copy

On a hot British summer day, my first week at the PHG Foundation draws to a close, and I have many first impressions to share. The PHG Foundation is a Cambridge-based science and health policy think-tank, with the mission to bridge the gap between science and its practical implementation in society. My internship started with introductions to all the members of the team, and immediately I was made to feel very welcome in the friendly office atmosphere. From day-one, my expectations were confirmed, in that there is a lot to learn from the dynamic, multi-disciplinary team, which includes experts from the fields of genomics, medicine, epidemiology, public health, law and economics.

My internship is under the supervision of Dr. Leila Luheshi, the science lead, and on the first day we sat down to discuss the plan for my research project on a new DNA analysis approach for cancer testing.  My role will be to critically review the evidence there is surrounding this new technology and highlight the policy issues there may be in its implementation. I started this quest by consulting the scientific literature. As a PhD student I have practice in reading scientific papers, yet in this role I am looking at it from a policy perspective. With the plan being drawn up, and my work well underway, I am very much looking forward to the second week.

brainstorming_week1

Day one at St. Anne’s Community Services

Week One

My project

Since it’s my first blog post I’ll just give a brief overview of my internship project. Over the next four-six weeks I’ll be working with St. Anne’s, a charity based in Leeds that provides a range of services to vulnerable groups in society, from the homeless to people with learning disabilities. My project involves working with St. Anne’s to screen groups of people for cognitive impairment, linked to ARBD – Alcohol Related Brain Damage.

 

ARBD is an umbrella term for various symptoms associated with physical damage to the brain, caused by both the toxic effects of alcohol and vitamin deficiencies that accompany its long-term use. At present, very little is known about the prevalence and severity of this condition in vulnerable groups, such as those with a history of alcohol and substance abuse. The aim of my project is to identify possible cases of cognitive impairment through screening volunteers at a homeless hostel for men, and a breakfast club for homeless men and women, and use this data to examine the incidence of ARBD among these groups. My project is a kind of pilot study, to see if there is a need for more widespread screening for ARBD, or a service in Leeds (and, potentially, around the UK) to help these people.

Day one!

My first day started with a meeting at Holdforth Court – a homeless hostel for men run by St. Anne’s – with some members of the St. Anne’s team. It’s hard for me to put myself in the shoes of some of the people I will be screening; most of them are homeless and many are alcohol-dependent, so it was important to discuss how I was going to approach the topic of screening with these people.

The screening tool I’ll be using (the Montreal Cognitive Assessment) consists of some questions to assess various cognitive domains (excuse the jargon!). Often, people with a history of long-term substance abuse do have impaired cognitive function and problems with their memory, so you can imagine that it’s a sensitive subject. Myself and the St. Anne’s team spent some time deciding how I’ll approach the subject with their service users (more jargon!), and we agreed that over the next week I’ll spend some time at Holdforth Court and a breakfast club run for homeless people just socializing with the service users. It’s important that they feel comfortable enough with me to allow me to perform the screen, so I’ll be spending some time just getting to know them.

At the moment I’m feeling pretty excited about the project, although I am nervous about doing something so different from usual life at Imperial! It’ll be nice to actually get out there and interact with the service users on a personal level, and to hopefully be able to help any that do show signs of cognitive impairment.

My internship took another surprising turn when we were trying to come up with ways to encourage people to attend the screening sessions, and it looks like I’m going to be putting my baking skills to the test! I’m going to (attempt) to whip up some cakes to entice people to be screened, although the staff at St. Anne’s of course have to sample them first! I never expected my internship to involved my culinary skills, but that’s what I think I’m going to enjoy so much about this project – it’s constantly adapting and presenting me with new challenges.

For the rest of the day I’ve been designing some posters to put up around Holdforth Court explaining what I’m doing and why, hopefully to encourage people to volunteer to be screened. I’ll keep you updated on how it all goes!

The first section of the MoCA, showing some of the questions asked.
The first section of the MoCA, showing some of the questions asked.

Week 1 at the MS Trust

The MS Trust is a wonderful charity whose principal aim is to improve the lives of people living with multiple sclerosis (MS). Not only do they provide information and support to those with MS, but they also aid health professionals working with People with MS (PwMS). They publish newsletters, participate and fund research, as well as educate health professionals. All in all the charity does a huge range of things, far more than I had anticipated when I first heard about them.

As part of this work with health professionals, the MS Trust is working alongside another organisation – ‘Therapists in MS’ (TiMS) – to produce a ‘toolkit’ to be used by allied health professionals involved in the care of people with MS. The purpose of the toolkit is to help health professionals identify and appreciate the wide range of implications MS can have on peoples’ lives, as well as provide information on the best way to manage these patients. This is where I come in.

My role this summer is to help the MS Trust and TiMS produce this toolkit. I have joined the information team, and am responsible for carrying out data collection and literary review. In other words I spend a lot of time on PubMed. I then choose the most relevant studies and pass them on to my supervisor, who is in charge of bringing everything together.

My first couple of days were spent reading up on all aspects of MS, from its pathophysiology to living with and treating the condition. This was made easier by the large number of publications that the MS Trust produce for patients and professionals alike, which all helped to give me a solid understanding of the condition.

I spent the rest of the week carrying out the research tasks – looking into a whole host of different areas. From vocational rehabilitation, linking MS with depression and changes to employment, it has already become clear to me that MS can have such an impact on peoples’ lives. I also spent a lot of time trawling government statistics websites to determine the cost of UTIs and pressure sores to the NHS. Whilst these things may seem unrelated to MS, they are both very important issues, and ones which I’m sure will be included in the toolkit once it has been completed.

For a couple of days next week I will spend time at a local MS physiotherapy centre, where I hope to get a real first-hand insight into the therapies that I have been researching and writing about. So far I am enjoying office life, and look forward to next week.

MS booklets
MS booklets