Month: October 2016

Monthly update from the Institute of Global Health Innovation

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Calling all UK based students!

Do you have an innovative idea for global health? Enter our Student Challenges Competition to win up to £5,000 to make that idea reality.  Find out more by visiting the website.

Recent activities

On 14 September, the Centre for Health Policy’s Sowerby eHealth Forum hosted their third annual symposium on the benefits and barriers to sharing patient data.

On the same day, we also jointly hosted a special guest lecture by general practitioner and public health policy advocate Dr Suwit Wibulpolprasert on universal health coverage in Thailand. The event was jointly hosted by our new colleagues from IDSI who moved into our Centre for Health Policy recently.  Watch the lecture in full here.

On 20 September, we hosted our 6th Annual Lecture with Dr David Blumenthal on ‘High need, high cost patients: A universal challenge’.  Watch the lecture in full here and read the Storify coverage here.

Latest IGHI Blog articles

International Youth Day, plenty of reasons to celebrate – By Professor Beate Kampmann, Professor of Paediatrics and Director of IGHI’s Centre for International Child Health (CICH)

FEAST – five years on – By Professor Kathryn Maitland, Director of the IGHI Centre of African Research and Engagement.

A letter to…my buddy Sami*, who killed himself a year ago – By anonymous Research Fellow, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London

Learning from Chinese health reforms – By Alexander Carter, Health Economist, Centre for Health Policy, IGHI

World First: UN Decide to Fight Antimicrobial Resistance – By guest bloggers Sarah Greaves, Katherine MacInnes and Alex Stockham, IN-PART

Ending the stigma this World Mental Health Day – By Dilkushi Poovendran, Research Assistant in Patient Experience and Patient Safety, Centre for Health Policy

The impact of Neglected Tropical Diseases on Universal Eye Health – By Professor Alan Fenwick of Imperial’s Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)

Write for us

We are always on the lookout for new bloggers.  If you would like to write for our blog, please get in touch with the IGHI Communications Manager, Jo, at j.seed@imperial.ac.uk

Jo Seed
Communications Manage
Institute of Global Health Innovation

Department of Primary Care and Public Health update

diamondSAPC Madingley Hall 2017

The GP Teaching team are currently well underway with preparations for one of the highlights of the medical education calendar, the Society for Academic Primary Care’s annual Madingley Hall conference in Cambridge. This year the GP teaching team are very proud to be organising and hosting this conference.

Taking place on 26-27 January 2017, the conference brings together brings together some of the best and brightest minds in medical education and research for a varied and stimulating programme. Our programme includes workshops, prizes and speeches from Harvard’s esteemed Professor David Hirsh, and President of the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health Professor Neena Modi.

Our theme for Madingley 2017 is “Primary Care at the Coalface: Mining for Diamonds” – creating shining examples of Primary Care clinicians and academics from the pressures of the NHS and government cutbacks.

Residential and non-residential packages are still available – to register and for more information, please visit http://www.imperial.ac.uk/school-public-health/news-and-events/sapc/

You can also submit an abstract or apply to host a workshop via this Wufoo form: https://imperialmed.wufoo.com/forms/p1aha25n1573e97/

If you have any further queries, please contact Ben at b.broglia@imperial.ac.uk

Faculty Teaching Forum

On 16 November 2016 the GP Teaching Team are organising a celebration of medical education around the theme “Tomorrow’s World: Educating Scientists, Doctors and Leaders of the future” in conjunction with the Faculty of Medicine. This annual event brings together faculty staff, clinicians and researchers for an exciting afternoon of innovative workshops, inspirational speeches, and of course the much-loved NHS Teachers Awards.

This year, we are very proud to welcome Visiting Professor of Surgical Education at the University of Oxford Richard Canter to give the keynote speech on the subject of leadership, and are looking forward to an afternoon panel debate on medical student selection.

Our workshop programme this year focuses on some of the current and future developments in medical education being spearheaded by Imperial College, including the use of Virtual Reality and Digital Learning and longitudinal integrated apprenticeships as seen in our pilot ICA course which launched this year.

For more information, please contact Maya Mistry at m.mistry@imperial.ac.uk

Ben Broglia
Primary Care Education Administrator
Department of Primary Care and Public Health

Apollo Therapeutics launch

The official Imperial launch of the Apollo Therapeutics took place on 6 October.  Apollo Therapeutics is a collaboration between three global pharmaceutical companies (GSK, J&J and AZ) and three Universities – Imperial, Cambridge and UCL.  This is the first time that three global pharmaceutical companies and the tech transfer offices of three world leading universities has come together to form a joint enterprise resulting in a truly innovative venture james-sterling-speaking-2aimed driving forward therapeutic innovation.  It is a £40 million fund to drive therapeutic innovation aims to to significantly improve the speed and potential of university research being translated into novel medicines. Apollo will support translational research, shaping projects at an early stage to optimise discovery and delivery of new breakthrough treatments for onward development. 

The launch event saw more than 75 Imperial academics, industry collaborators and Apollo representatives coming tog ether.  The event was opened by Professor James Stirling and the scheme was introduced by Ian Tomlinson (Apollo Therapeutics Chairman) and Richard Butt (Apollo Therapeutics CEO).  A panel Q&A session with The Apollo Leadership team together with Professor Jonathan Weber and Dr Mene Pangalos (‎Executive Vice President at AstraZeneca) discussed the opportunities for the College presented by the venture.

A call for biologics proposals is currently open; for more information about the scheme please see: http://apollotherapeutics.com/

Dr Sarah Wagstaffe
Head of Research Strategy
Faculty of Medicine

Postgraduate Connections

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The first PG Connections event for 2016-17 was a great success, and was attended by well over 200 students from MSc, MRes and PhD programmes across the Faculty of Medicine. Newly enrolled postgraduates took advantage of this chance to meet and network with other students at a reception after the main event. The highlight was a provocative talk by Imperial College Professor David Nutt, who was sacked in 2009 from the government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs. Professor Nutt took many questions from the hall during his session, and from a queue of students after it had ended. The title of his talk, ‘Why scientists should also be revolutionaries’, was quite coincidentally echoed by the theme of the Faculty of Medicine summer school, ‘Revolutions in Biomedicine.’ Coordinator Dr Kirsty Flower showed slides from the school, and called for PG students interested in working as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) during the 2017 programme mini-research project in cell/molecular biology.

The PG Connections Advisory Group was set up in 2016 to enable Faculty of Medicine PG students to contribute to events in the PG Connections series by suggesting themes, formats and speakers. The group was a success, and there will be an information meeting for interested students on 25 October.

For information about PG Connections or Revolutions in Biomedicine, contact: l.stables@imperial.ac.uk

Lottie Stables
Postgraduate Education Administrator
Faculty of Medicine

Wellcome Trust Institute Strategic Support Fund

The College has been awarded £5M from Wellcome for the next five years, continuing the Institute Strategic Support Fund which has been instrumental in supporting wellcome-logo-blackbiomedical research across the College over the past 5 years.  The scheme has previously funded numerous internal funding streams targeting the enhancement of multidisciplinary research, the support of early career researchers, strategic initiatives enhancing support for priority themes and public engagement activities. Through strategic allocation of £7.5M funding since 2011/2012, the scheme has supported more than 380 investigators through 185 awards across the College and in turn leveraged a further £53M in follow-on funding.

In 2016/2017, the ISSF scheme will support Clinical Research Careers through Global Health Fellowships and Clinician Researchers schemes and non-clinical researchers through Faculty Fellowships.  The scheme will also support key initiatives to promote collaboration and will ensure the College is supporting an inclusive research environment. All opportunities for funding will be advertised on the internal funding opportunities webpage.

Dr Sarah Wagstaffe
Head of Research Strategy
Faculty of Medicine

Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science (ICCESS) update

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Sir Philip Dilley visit to ICCESS

The Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science (ICCESS) recently hosted a visit from Sir Philip Dilley, Chair of Imperial’s governing Council. Sir Philip learned of ICCESS’ work in combining medical simulation with innovative approaches to engagement after meeting Centre Director Prof Roger Kneebone at a reception at South Kensington earlier this year.

Sir Philip graduated from Imperial with a First in Civil Engineering in 1976, and spent much of his engineering career with the Arup Group where he was Executive Chairman from 2009 to 2014. ‘A lot has changed at Imperial College since the late 70’s,’ says Sir Philip, ‘and one of the most impressive changes is the amount of cross-departmental collaboration and research.’ Much of the work of ICCESS brings together diverse teams, in one case even exploring lacemaking techniques to learn how to better manage threads during complex surgery.

As part of the visit, Sir Philip got to try his hand at open abdominal surgery – albeit in simulated form! The experience opened his eyes to how powerful simulation can be. ‘My total immersion and focus on the surgical task at hand meant that I hadn’t noticed any of the other activities going on around me, let alone the wellbeing of the patient. And I’d only been given the ‘surgery-lite’ experience without gowns or blood.’

ICCESS at the North West London Simulation Conference

ICCESS played a major role at the North West London Simulation Conference on 21 September 2016. The conference brought together delegates with an interest in simulation delivery and development from a wide range of professions, including doctors, nurses, scientists and technicians.

Dr Tanika Kelay, Dr Miranda Kronfli and Sharon-Marie Weldon demonstrated some of ICCESS’ simulation equipment and environments including their ‘simbulance’ and catheterisation lab. Sharon and Miranda also delivered two workshops in which they demonstrated ICCESS’ approach to multi-disciplinary simulation through the use of Actor Network Theory with an emphasis on the design process itself, using some of their recent research to highlight how this differs from current practice. Centre Director Prof Roger Kneebone was one of the keynote speakers and explained how ICCESS are reframing simulation as a means of engaging with different audiences to drive innovation in healthcare.

The conference was very well-attended and the team reported that delegates found ICCESS’ work interesting and inspiring. The experience has generated a great deal of interest in the Centre’s ongoing projects with several new contacts who are keen to be involved thus building on ICCESS’s growing network of collaborators.

Simulation Reframed

A recent publication by Prof Kneebone provides further support for simulation as a powerful means of engaging with publics, patients and experts outside medicine. Simulation Reframed has been published in the Advances in Simulation journal and can be read here.

Duncan Boak
Centre Manager
Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science

Mr Chris Lattimer wins Phlebosophy award in Venice

Mr Chris Lattimer wins Phlebosophy award in VeniceGala dinner celebrations after the congress. Left to right. Professor Giuseppe Andreozzi (Padova), Dr Evi Kalodiki (Imperial College London), Dr Christopher Lattimer (Imperial College London)Preview Changes & Dr Sergio Gianesini (University of Ferrara).

The three prize winners at the international inaugural Phlebosophy congress 23-24 September 2016 were Dr Roberto Parisi (San Giovanni e Paolo Hospital, Venice), Christopher Lattimer and Sergio Gianesini. Each received a brass paperweight inspired by the ancient Athenian tetradrachm, 5th century BC. The meeting was held at the Centro culturale Don Orione Artigianelli in Venice with Dimitrios Kontothanassis (Istituto Flebologico Italiano, Ferrara) as president who awarded the prizes.

During his lecture, Christopher Lattimer PhD proposed a theory as to why some patients present late in the course of their venous disease. “Patients without pain do not have the signals required to undergo anti-gravitational activities like compression or elevation or to seek help. It is these patients who do not experience pain on dependency which are the ones that progress to venous ulceration.”

Partnership for Child Development update

Partnership for Child Development’s Dr Elisabetta Aurino presented the initial findings of a three-year impact evaluation of Home Grown School Feeding on communities in Ghana as part of the School Health and Nutrition webinar series.

Image courtesy of the Ghana School Feeding programme
Image courtesy of the Ghana School Feeding programme

Home Grown School Feeding programmes are government-led programmes which provide free school meals using food purchased from local smallholder farmers. PCD’s impact evaluation looked into the impact that these programmes have on the health and education of the school children who eat them and on the incomes of the farmers that supply them.  Initial findings have shown that schools that provided school feeding experienced higher enrolment and reduced absenteeism rates and that schools girls in particular benefited from HGSF with improvements observed in literacy and cognition. Analysis of farmers data shows that 1 in 3 households in communities with HGSF programmes increased the value of their agricultural sales. A complete analysis of this data will be completed in the coming months.

The SHN webinar is a monthly webinar supported by Imperial College London, Save the Children, UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, GIZ and other leading organisations within the School Health and Nutrition field. To sign up to this webinar visit the webinar home at www.schoolsandhealth.org/Pages/SHN-Webinar-Series.aspx

Francis Peel
Senior Communications Manager
Partnership for Child Development

Volunteers of WEST AFRICAN Descent needed for 3D heart scan

Genetic studies of the heart and circulation (Ethics reference number 09/H0707/69).

african-heartThe Robert Steiner MRI unit, within the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, is looking for healthy volunteers from west African descent aged 18-80 with no heart-related health problems. The study aims to develop an atlas of the human heart to help scientists to determine the effect of different DNA and genes on heart shape and function.

The study will involve a single appointment at Hammersmith Hospital, and volunteers are compensated for their time and will receive a free CD of their scan.

Staff who wish to participate should email heart@imperial.nhs.uk
For more information visit the study website http://digital-heart.org/