Blog posts

Complaints procedures faced by doctors risk harming patients, study suggests

ComplaintsA study by one of Surgery & Cancer’s Adjunct Professors, Prof Tom Bourne has been looking into how complaints procedures faced by doctors risk harming patients.

Doctors who go through complaints procedures experience high rates of serious depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, according to a new study.

Four out of five doctors also reported changing the way they treat their patients as a result of either complaints against themselves, or observing a colleague go through a complaints process.

The authors of the research say that by causing psychological ill health and encouraging defensive practice, the processes designed to hold doctors to account are having negative consequences for patients.

The findings come from a survey of 7,926 doctors published in BMJ Open. Read complete story here.

Prof Naomi Chayen gives outreach lecture

Prof Naomi Chayen gave an outreach lecture on the 8th January to a medical ethics group in North London, focusing on the research currently taking place within Computation and Systems Medicine, as well as ethical issues concerning pure research, rather than actual medical issues.

Surgery & Cancer want to try and capture all the outreach work going on in the Department, so if anyone has any news they want to share then please email Kathryn Johnson. 

Big Data: The future of Healthcare Innovation?

Imperial College Innovation Forum Launch Event
Big Data: The future of Healthcare Innovation?

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Big Data has been hailed to be the frontier for innovation, competition and productivity by leading firms around the world.

Join us at the Launch Event of Imperial College Innovation Forum where we have the experts at the forefront of Big Data discuss their thoughts and vision for Big Data and its role in healthcare innovation.

Date: Wednesday 28th January 2015
Time: 6.30 for 7pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre G16, SAF Building, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London

Our speakers on the day are:

Best wishes,
ICIF team

Imperial Quality Improvement Sprints organised by Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust

Calling all creative problem solvers… 

Could your innovative ideas make a difference in our hospitals?

At Imperial College Healthcare we are continuously looking for new and better ways to improve patient experience. As a result we have launched a series of investigative 2-day events called Imperial Quality Improvement Sprints. For more information see the website.

Interested in taking part?

Whether you are an engineer, artist, musician, entrepreneur, or an organisation looking for a challenging and rewarding new experience for your staff, come and help us revolutionise healthcare at one of the events below:

Monday 2nd to Tuesday 3rd February, all day, W12 Conference Centre, Hammersmith Hospital
Monday 16th to Tuesday 17th March, all day, W12 Conference Centre Hammersmith Hospital

Please email IQISprints@imperial.nhs.uk or call 020 331 25443.

Further details are on the website.

New trial to evaluate intestine implant to treat obesity related type 2 diabetes

Endo barrier storyA new trial has been launched by Prof Julian Teare and his team, to investigate the effectiveness of a tube-like device inserted into the small intestine to treat type 2 diabetes. The study is now open for participants and you can read more about it on the Imperial news story or on the EndoBarrier website.

Prof McGregor on exhibition at the Science Museum

Alison SMProf Alison McGregor is now part of a new exhibition at the Science Museum called “Engineer Your Future”, which was opened by HRH The Prince of Wales on Tuesday.

The exhibition is aimed at 11-15 year olds and focuses on getting more children interested in engineering, through a variety of objects and interactive games, one of which features Prof McGregor.

The Engineer Your Future exhibition is free to visit and runs for the next three years at the Science Museum so go have a look.

Athena SWAN Award Ceremony

Athena Swan Awards 2014_00091 579x300The Athena SWAN award ceremony took place in November at Robinson College, University of Cambridge where Julia Anderson and Kate Hardy went along to collect Surgery & Cancer’s bronze award, presented by Prof Dame Julia Higgins.

It was an Imperial day with the Provost James Stirling and Dot Griffiths in attendance to support all the Imperial Departments receiving awards, including the Institute of Clinical Sciences and MRC Clinical Sciences Centre getting their bronze award and the Department of Chemical Engineering and National Heart and Lung institute getting their silver renewals.

Currently work is underway in the Department preparing for our silver application in November 2015, with our new mentoring scheme launching in the new year. For more information on this please take a look at our Athena SWAN page.

Athena Swan Awards 2014_00102

CSM Outreach Activity

Outreach 2On the 31st October, the Division of Computational Systems Medicine (CSM), invited 26 students from IntoUniveristy London Brixton branch for an outreach event.

The students, aged between 14 and 17, took part in various activities, from Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H NMR) spectroscopy, comparing characteristic spectra of food products and urinary profiles of healthy and diseased individuals, to a laboratory tour, a disease biomarker workshop and a short-course on microbial pathogens, such as Ebola and HIV.

Outreach 3The CSM outreach team, headed by Professor Nigel Gooderham, was organised by academics at various stages of their careers (PhD students, postdocs and lecturers), who subsequently talked about their current roles, as well as academic life at Imperial College and requirements to get into university initially.

Overall, the CMS team enjoyed reaching out and engaging with the students, all of who gave positive feedback, and wishes them all the very best for their future careers.

Equality, Diversity and Disability Information

Calibre Programme
The Calibre Programme is running again in 2015! The Calibre Programme is a focussed development programme for disabled staff in Higher Education and beyond, the programme is aimed at individuals who seek to gain a greater understanding of their role in the work place. It is suitable for academics, researchers, technicians, professional and support staff from higher education and beyond.

Declaration of Interest should be made by 12pm on the 5th of January 2015, find out more here.

Disability Awareness Month
There are a series of events for the Disability Awareness Month running in November and December:

  • 26th November—Traveling Tenderly – A difficult journey from Tinteskin to Imperial – Register Here (A personal story of struggles and victories with depression addiction and self-harming & living with a visual impairment)
  • 1st December—Keynote Lecture—HIV in 2015: On the edge of a revolution—Register Here (World Aids Day Panel Discussion – A talk looking into the current state of the epidemic, prevention and treatment)
  • 3rd & 5th December – MHFA Two Day training Course—Register Here (The MHFA standard course teaches techniques to provide help to someone (staff or students) experiencing a mental health problem before professional help is obtained.)

To get involved and for more information follow the link

Virtual Dissection Table Donated to the Human Anatomy Unit

tableThe Human Anatomy Unit has recently been the grateful recipient of an Anatomage Virtual Dissection Table, kindly donated by Prof Ara Darzi.

The table offers both gross full body, male and female anatomy as well as numerous pathological examples derived from real patient data. The table offers a new and exciting learning resource within the unit and is available to both staff and students.

The Anatomage Table is location in the Pathology Museum 11th floor Charing Cross Hospital Campus.

Imperial to be part of new UK research centre to tackle musculoskeletal disorders in the workplace

Imperial College will be part of the new national research centre Arthritis Research UK/MRC Centre for Musculoskeletal  Health and Work, which aims to tackle musculoskeletal disorders in the workplace.

Researchers at the £1.4m Arthritis Research UK/MRC Centre for Musculoskeletal  Health and Work,  led by the University of Southampton, aim to find cost-effective ways of reducing the impact of conditions that affect the muscles, joints and bones on people’s employment and productivity, with benefits for patients, employers and society as a whole.

Prof Alison McGregor from the MSk Lab in Surgery, will be working in collaboration with Prof Anthony Bull from the Department of Engineering. Prof McGregor made the following comment about the work they will be involved in:

The project will be collaborating with Occupational Health at Guys and St Thomas’ and is looking at psychological and mechanical risk factors for low back pain. We are going to recruit and follow a cohort of 200 nurses looking at their spinal function and psychological profiles on recruitment and will then repeat the measure if they report low back pain. The focus is looking at injury mechanisms with a view to developing preventative strategies or screening tools.

Director of the new centre, Professor David Coggon, said: “Musculoskeletal conditions are a major cause of sickness absence and job loss.  We’re enormously excited about our new centre which we hope will lead to new ways of preventing their occurrence, and helping employees who are affected to stay in productive work.”

The centre will focus its research on the three main musculoskeletal causes of work disability – back, neck and arm pain, osteoarthritis and inflammatory arthritis. A special theme will be the impact of these conditions on older people who are approaching normal retirement age.

Find out more from the MRC news page.

 

Trainee Publication Prize

LaycockCongratulations to Dr Helen Laycock (Clinical Fellow/Anaesthetic Registrar doing a PhD in APMIC), who was awarded the 2014 Trainee Publication Prize by the Faculty of Pain Medicine (Royal College of Anaesthetists) for a paper published with Dr Istvan Nagy and Dr Carsten Bantel from APMIC.

The paper was titled “Peripheral mechanisms of burn injury-associated pain” and was published in the European Journal of Pharmacology in 2013. Dr Laycock presented a short summary of the paper at the Faculty of Pain Medicines Annual Meeting on the 14th November.

WW1 surgeons could do little for amputees’ pain – and treatment remains a challenge

WW1Professor Andrew Rice from the section of Anaesthetics, Pain Medicine and Intensive Care has collaborated with historian Dr Emily Mayhew and army surgeon Major Dafydd Edwards in a paper published in The Lancet on Friday, looking at how WW1 surgeons could do little for amputees’ pain and how treatment still remains a challenge.

Army doctors in the First World War were helpless to stop soldiers who lost limbs from suffering in pain, according to researchers. A century on, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have made the loss of limbs common among military casualties once again, but while prosthetic technology has improved dramatically, there is still a shortage of effective treatments for pain caused by damaged nerves.

Read more on this in the College article.