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January 30, 2004
UEA in BMJ
This week's BMJ carries an interview with the Dean of the UEA medical school, Sam Leinster.
PROFILE: New school
Finola Lynch
BMJ 2004;328:s48,
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January 29, 2004
THES: "BMA warns of researchmad medical schools"
The contradictions between the BMA and CHMS have become more open as the debate on the place of research in medical education continues. Today's THES reports that the BMA is calling for a new funding model to reflect the burden of medical school teaching shouldered by NHS doctors "neither paid nor trained to do it' according to Michael Rees, Chair of the BMA's Medical Academic Staff Committee. CHMS on the other hand strongly oppose such a move, arguing that DoH funding would leave medical education at the mercy of NHS shortterm funding priorities.
Full text is only available to subscribers but the paper reference is:
THES 2004 1625:5 (January 30)
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THES: Human tissue bill: "potentially disastrous"
The THES reports that researchers are worried about the potential effects of the Human Tissues bill on medical research. The bill is now in committtee and the Wellcome Trust and the MRC are concerned about its confusing and unworkable wording.
Full text is only available to subscribers but the paper reference is:
THES 2004 1625: 4 (January 30)
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THES: nursing and other course to be exempt from tution fees
The THES reports that nursing and other allied health courses will be exempted from tuition fees under new Department of Health contracts. The contract will be worth about £6,200 per student with a form of London weighting and other small regional variations.
Full text is only available to subscribers but the paper reference is:
THES 2004 1625: 4 (January 30)
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January 28, 2004
BBC reports BMA as saying top up fees will mean £64000 debts for
medical students January 24, 2004 See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3424233.stm
There's also video footage of Sophie Hutchinson
See http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/pr240104
for the BMA press release, links to their research and other background.
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New database on telemedicine and ehealth
UK Telemedicine and Ehealth Information Service The University of Portsmouth has just launched a database on telemedicine and ehealth, sponsored by the NHS Information Authority.
Telemedicine and Ehealth Information Service (TEIS, pronounced, they say, to rhyme with "ice") is a database of activities, companies and other
information about the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health care to patients at a distance.
It's accessible by two routes:
on the NHS networks at http://www.teis.nhs.uk/ on the University's web site at http://www.teis.port.ac.uk/
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January 23, 2004
BMJ: January What the Educators are Saying column
What the educators are saying
Val Wass, Paul O'Neill
BMJ 2004;328:210, doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7433.210
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In this week's BMJ...
Cohort study of examination performance of undergraduate medical students learning in community settings
Paul Worley, Adrian Esterman, David Prideaux
BMJ 2004;328:207209, doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7433.207
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January 22, 2004
PNAS on ejournals and site licences
An article in PNAS discusses the economics of ejournals and site licences and consequent effects on the scientific community.
Carl T. Bergstrom, and Theodore C. Bergstrom
The costs and benefits of library site licenses to academic journals
PNAS 101: 897902; published online before print as 10.1073/pnas.0305628101
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LTSN01 Workshop: Exploring Key Elements Of Supervising Undergraduate
Research Projects In Medicine And Biological Sciences LTSN01 announce a workshop on supervising undergraduate research projects: see:
http://www.ltsn01.ac.uk/resources/meetings/workshops/supervisingug
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January 16, 2004
THES: "Lack of medical lecturers threatens NHS Salvation"
Today's THES reports a survey by the Council of Heads of Medical Schools (CHMS) which draws attention to a fall of a third in the numbers of young lecturers in medical schools. Since 1998 medical student numbers have increased by 40% but numbers of researchers fell by 18%, lecturers by 33% and readers and senior lecturers by 10%. There was a 6% increase in the number of professor but a 14% increase in vacant professorial posts. The survey is not yet on the CHMS website which says last updated 3 November 2003. Full text is only available to subscribers but the paper reference is:
THES 2004 1623:72 (January 16)
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Letters on open access in THES
Today's THES carries two letters continuing the debate on open access, one from Fred Friend rebutting the assertion that open access will censor publication according to ability to pay, and the other suggesting that learned societies might need to charge higher submission fees than other publishers. Full text is only available to subscribers but the paper reference is:
THES 2004 1623: 17 (January 16)
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BMJ letters on the death of the teaching autopsy
The BMJ carries seven letters in response to an article on the death of the teaching autopsy (O'Grady, G Death of the teaching autopsy [with commentary by J Underwood] BMJ 2003:327:8024 (4 October)
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BMJ: new initiative to improve undergraduate teaching in acute
care The BMJ's career focus reports a new initiative to improve teaching about acute care, the neatlynamed ACUTE project (Acute Care Undergraduate Teaching)
BMJ 2004 328: s29 (17 January)
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BMJ: university fee changes may deter poor students
As The Higher Education Bill starts its course through Parliament, the BMJ reports the deputy chairman of the BMA's medical students committee as warning that "Fear of debt will mean that many students, particularly those from working class backgrounds, will decide against studying medicine."
University fee changes may deter poor students from studying medicine
Susan Mayor
BMJ 2004;328:128
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January 15, 2004
A UK National Library of Health?
On Tuesday 6th January I attended the Kent Surrey and Sussex Health Libraries Networks ’ Twelfth Night event. Two of the presentations there I think are worthy of record in this blog.
Muir Gray, Director of NeLH , spoke on the theme that “knowledge is the enemy of disease”. (Who first said this?) He outlined a topology of knowledge and the seven ubiquitous health care problems. He described four phases in the development of a National Knowledge Services
1) Generation: coordinated procurement of knowledge resources which
a) meet standards of quality and document management
b) meet needs that are presently unsatisfied He pointed out that knowledge production in the NS was uncoordinated and inefficient.
2) Organisation: four main components:
a) NHS Direct
b) NeLH
c) the National Core Content procurement
d) what he described as (and BentToth elaboratedas the National Network of Libraries: services from the NHS, higher education and specialists (Royal Colleges, learned societies, patient information services, etc)
3)Mobilisation: through:
a) push (e.g. email to communities)
b) pull (NeLH, libraries, intranets)
c) prompt (cf aircraft maintenance)
4)Utilisation:
a) NHSU
b) evidence based decision making
c) patient decision aids
d) librarians’ attachments to GPs.
NHS organisations will need
1) cultures that manage knowledge systems
2) systems for inputting and distributing knowledge
3) structures that reflect this: for example with CKOs on senior management boards.
Machines are good handling evidence, people are good at talking to patients. (This raises the question, what are library/information people good at?
Ben Toth:
Ben stressed librarians’ role as innovators, particularly in computer applications
What would it mean to have a National Library of Health? Ben said there were >500 librarians and >3000 libraries (Muir had suggested that there were 800 librarians: a necessary preliminary job is to develop an accurate idea of how many libraries/librarians we actually have).
He discussed open archiving and pointed out that it was the NHS that led and HE that followed in the BioMed Central deal
He ran through some of the pressures on libraries, including:
• changing user expectations
• the Google effect (and mentioned in passing the increasing integration of Google with OCLC records and the BL catalogue link with Amazon )
• internal NHS drivers included the NHS elecrtoic patient record,the development of the NHS University, financial constraints, patientcenteredness and the challenge of managing boundaries between NHS/Higher Education/Further Education and Social Care
The solution he proposed was as a single integrated service harnessing the power of the >500 libraries, with a greater spend on CPD for the information professionals who run it. The NHS network needs to:
• get greater value from its spend on libraries, as the NCC deal had already done
• be open to public and patients
• save librarians’ time,
• be closely integrated with NHSU and the NCRS
From the user point of view it should:
• be online at any time,
• have n physical access points
• offer a professional refrence and query answering service
• be integrated with knowledge and learning
• have new personal and personalisable services, such as current awareness.
• have one front door withl inks with local services
• be personalisable to mylibrary
Libraries would need to develop:
• services at Strategic Health Authority (SHA) level
• shared digital reference
• standard licences.
New opportunities arise with the Map of Medicine linked to the Electronic patient record (based as I understand it on SNOMED ) and the information architecture behind these services
He pointed to the potential of RSS feeds for delivering news, jobs, gossip and research, citing the example of an RSS service for doctors in Trent, findings and wondered if Doctors.net and/or the RCGP should be developing this.
I may well have left out great chunks, but I hope I haven’t traduced the sense of Ben and Muir’s presentations. With luck, HLIN might put them up on the web soon.
Update 19th Jan: they're up now at: http://stlis.thenhs.com/hln/admin/lsmf/archive/2004/jan/january.htm
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January 13, 2004
CILIP evidence to House of Commons Science & Technology
Committee Discussion on the Jiscmail liscilip list suggest that CILIP will be submitting evidence to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee enquiry , which is good. The Health Libraries Group has also undertaken to submit evidence. The more the merrier, I say
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January 12, 2004
LOCKSS: digital preservation
The BMJ reports the inelegantlynamed LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) initiative from Stanford. Supported by over fifty publishers, including the BMJ, the LOCKSS project gives librarians a cheap and easy way to keep, preserve and offer access to local copies of web published material.
Reich, V and Rosenthal, D
Preserving today's scientific record for tomorrow
BMJ 2004;328:6162 (10 January)
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US universities cancel bundled subscriptions
The BMJ reports that three US university libraries are cancelling "big deal" journal subscriptions with Elsevier. Harvard is cancelling a bundled package of Elsevier journals, and Cornell also announced last month it would not renew a package of more than 900 titles. Stanford is considering a draft resolution on journal bundling and will make a decision in February.
BMJ 2004; 328: 68 (10 January)
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January 08, 2004
"Practising doctors are needed to teach students"Times letters
Three letters appear in the Times this morning supporting concerns about the future of clinical academics first reported on 2nd January.
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Launch and plans
I launched this blog on 5th January 2004 and will run it as a sixmonth pilot to be evaluated at the end.
It's put together using iBlog and an RSS feed is available from http://www.roper.org.uk/roper/bsms/rss.xml Plans include:
1. adding a commenting facility using Haloscan
2. implementing a taxonomy
3. investigating if there might be potential interest in it outside BSMS, for example in other new (and old) medical schools, CHMS , UMSLG , the BMJ and their What the educators are saying service, LTSN01, SCONULACHS etc etc
4. finding a more officiallooking and permanent home for it than my personal web site
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PDAs again
From a prepublication version of John Hewlett's Current Awareness column in the CILIP Health Libraries Group Newsletter :
Rios, G.R. Simple and secure: infrared PDA services. Journal of Hospital
Librarianship 2003; 3(3): 9397.
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January 05, 2004
Once more on open access in THES
More on open archiving The latest THES runs a piece by Geoff Watts on open access, following up on an earlier article i covered in this blog. The author cites two examples of the problem open access hopes to solve:
1. He searches the Nature website for articles on open access and finds as the first result among 190 an article entitled: Scientific publishing: who will pay for open access? But he would have to pay $18 to view it
2. He also cites Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, who told a recent JISC meeting how he had tried to access a report in Journal of Infectious Disease report on malaria research in Gambia, work funded by the Wellcome, but got the message "access denied".
Watts discusses various solutions:
PubMed Central : set up by the US National Library of Medicine, to offer free access to all peerreviewed life sciences literature
Public Library of Science: PLoS have moved away from their original model of asking researchers to pledge not to work with journals that didn't make content freely available six months after publication, but have now started to developing their own journal titles, PLoS Biology being the first. PLoS medicine is to launched later this year
Institutional selfarchiving: here they quote, as before, Steve Harnad of Southampton , the leading UK champion of selfarchiving.
I must point out that the online content of the THES itself is not freely available, but is only accessible to subscribers through a rather clunky password system. The paper reference is:
Watts, Geoff
Crusaders for a truly free flow of ideas
THES 2004 1621: 1718
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BMJ on open archiving
The BMJ also takes up the issue. See:
Open access publishing takes off
Tony Delamothe and Richard Smith
BMJ 2004;328:13, doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7430.1
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Letters on academic medicine in BMJ
A large number of letters on academic medicine occur in the latest BMJ, to be found at http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/current.shtml#LETTERS , at least for the rest of this week.
They're in reply to an editorial:
BMJ Publishing Group to launch an international campaign to promote academic medicine
Jocalyn Clark and Richard Smith
BMJ 2003;327:10011002, doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7422.1001
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Hospital IT makers told prices too high, reports FT
Today's Financial Times reports that Richard Granger, NHS IT Director, has warned manufacturers of radiograph digitising systems that they must cut prices or the NHS may develop its own inhouse system.
Remaining bidders for the contract include Fujitsu and EDS , as well as SchlumbergerSem a who won the ebooking contract. Full content requires a subscription.
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January 02, 2004
Times on research and teaching
"New generation of doctors will get inferior teaching" claims Times This morning's Times runs a piece by Glen Owen based on a study by Professors Banatvala of GKT and Malcolm Symonds, former Dean of Notttingham which draws attention to the problems that increased emphasis on research output has caused for medical academic career paths and staffing levels. "Clinical academics are being eliminated as a breed" they claim.
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