Joe’s view of chalk and talk

Well, here I am flying to Geneva again. This time I’m leaving from London Heathrow and flying with BA rather than EasyJet.

The geek highlight of the flight is the downloading of my boarding-pass to my iphone! It works when my phone is scanned at security. Properly cool!

I do wonder, momentarily, what would happen if my battery went flat. Otherwise, it strikes me that this technology could just as easily link a patient to the right operation as a passenger to the right flight.

Great aim for a one-eyed man

I’m flying out a day later than planned because, I guess like a lot of you, recent events have left me a little uncertain which way my career should go now.

I’ve had a job interview in London. But should I stick with IT? Go back to medicine? Move into management? Think about consultancy? Look at retirement??? Surely not retirement, I’m only 51 and have plenty of gas left in the tank.

While I chew over the options, I’m joining my wife at Chalet Comparethesoftware.co.uk for a spot of skiing and strategic planning with an old friend and senior executive of the Uptime Institute, Phil Collerton.

Phil and I have been friends since we were 11 years old. We had both been to lovely local primary schools, where we had excelled and been loved by our classmates and our cuddly primary school teachers.

Now, we had just started secondary school and we were having our first geography lesson. Phil was sitting at the desk next to me, bright ginger and the smallest kid in the class.

In walked Mr Weatherburn, a wiry, terrifying man who was clearly of the ‘first-establish-who’s-in-charge’ school of education.

“Silence,” he screamed. We fell silent. Someone coughed. Mr Weatherburn turned his eye towards the source (yes, he really only had one eye, so his nickname was, inevitably and cruelly, “Cyclops”; although nobody ever told him).

In a single movement, he slipped a bullet of chalk from his tweed jacket pocket and propelled it with such venom and accuracy that the target’s head snapped back like Jack Kennedy’s in the Dallas motorcade.

An amazing feat of accuracy for a one eyed man. Several of us made involuntary noises, a mixture of shock and awe.

“You boy,” he bellowed; the eye falling on me, although I dared not meet its gaze. “And you!” he snarled; the eye falling on Phil this time. “When I say silence you will be silent!

“Stand at the front of the class with your nose touching the blackboard, the pair of you!” We complied. He came very close now. We could smell him. Mints and Old Spice.

He carefully drew chalk crosses on the blackboard, two inches above our noses.“Put your nose on the cross” he whispered in our ears. We complied, standing on tiptoe.

As it turned out, Mr Weatherburn was an international class middle distance runner who knew a thing or two about lactic acid. After a couple of minutes our calf muscles were screaming.

After what seems an age we are ordered back to our seats with Mr Weatherburn’s authority stamped on the class. More importantly for this story, a 40 year friendship was born.

Working with networks

When our gang all went our separate ways to university, it was Phil who provided the hub to our network of friends.

He also ended up working as “something to do with the internet” and eventually for the Uptime Institute, an end-user knowledge network.

Phil “got” the importance of networks before the rest of us. It was Phil who introduced me to Pitt Turner who co-founded the Uptime Institute in 1993.

Pitt was kind enough to offer me some advice during the darker days of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The Uptime Institute seeks to improve the quality of data centres by sharing information between data centre managers to everyone’s mutual benefit, even though they are business rivals. It is in everyone’s interests to have less downtime.

Some of this kind-of thinking guided us in the establishment of the National Mental Health Informatics Network during NPfIT.

But now that the network is hosted by the British Computer Society’s Mental Health Group, we are seeking to move our efforts to another level in terms of improving mental health electronic patient records.

To this end, we have done two major pieces of work in the last few months. Firstly, at our 3rd Annual Congress at The British Computer Society in November, we held a workshop entitled ‘what mental health suppliers need from system suppliers.’

The results of this are available to our members on our NHS Networks Website. Secondly, today we are launching the first ever National Mental Health EPR End-User Survey.

We hope that this survey will become an annual event and will contribute to an open and transparent market place for EPRs.

The quality of EPRs has been shrouded in mystery for too long. If I can be rated online so can EPRs.

We want YOU to fill in this survey

In order to get as much data as we can, I’d be grateful if YOU would pass on this link to as many end-users as you can via email and social networking.

I look forward to seeing the results and sharing them with our membership. In due course, I hope that health IT systems will have a market place characterised by transparency on quality and price.

We have just seen the publication of the Francis 2 report into events at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, in which there is much talk of culture change and a duty to capture and report poor quality.

We will have a new ‘duty of candour’ to patients and service users. Openness and transparency will be our watchwords in future and, in the words of Louis Brandeis in 1913: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

As a group of end-users, this survey represents our chance to apply that disinfectant to this market. It is time to fight for excellence in everything in the NHS, so take your nose from the blackboard, stand firmly on your own two feet and share this link as widely as you can.

I’ve also created a shorter URL which is easier to email and publish as it doesn’t get truncated: http://goo.gl/lXBCk

All responses will be held in confidence and the anonymity of responders guaranteed. Thank you for your participation.

About the author: Joe McDonald is a practising NHS consultant psychiatrist. Over the past five years he has been an NHS trust medical director and national clinical lead for IT at NHS Connecting for Health – a stint that included 18 months as medical director of the Lorenzo delivery team!

His experiences in the National Programme for IT in the NHS have left him with a passion for usability and "end user knowledge networks.” He is the founding chairman of the National Mental Health Informatics Network. Motto: we don’t get fooled again. Follow him on twitter @CompareSoftware