#1carejc - Primary Care Journal Club

This was an idea that started last summer- why don't we have an online primary care journal club? #twitjc - Twitter journal club is still going strong, but we always had the idea that wanted to try something different and try different forms of social media. A few weeks ago I spoke to Peter Sloane, an Irish GP, on google plus and he mentioned that he wanted to explore the potential of G+ for education so I suggested that #1carejc would be a great thing to try and get going.

We picked a paper on osteopathy in primary care that was suggested by David Lewis a few weeks before his death last summer. On our panel we had primary care researcher Ceri Butler who has also lived with chronic back pain for many years. Joining us from Australia was Karen Price, an Australian GP and educationalist who knew David Lewis well. I was just off the train from Cardiff to Manchester. Unfortunately we couldn't get Prof John Licciardione, the 1st author of the paper to join  the conversation- but we hope to catch up with him again.

Was it a success? Well yes, we had a good discussion about the context of this research on back pain- the experience of GPs and of patients. We had a little bit of time to discuss the research itself but we were missing the voice of the researcher. Our teething technical problems limited the amount of time we had to discuss the paper but it was only ever intended that the google plus hangout should be one part of a wider discussion about the research topic.

We hope that the discussion can continue in the google plus community we have started. And that the videos will be a resource that people can look back on. We'd appreciate any feedback you have especially if you can leave it in the google plus community.

So here it is! Skip the 1st part (technical mishaps) and start at about 27 mins in - or even at 32 mins in when Ceri starts speaking very powerfully about her experiences.

Digital healthcare - a road paved with good intentions?

Digital healthcare - a road paved with good intentions? from Richard Stanton on Vimeo.

A treat for all those interested in the use of technology in healthcare, this is a lecture that Professor James Morgan, who leads the implementation of the open-source electronic health record, Open Eyes, gave in Cardiff earlier this year. You can find out more about the Science in Public series of lectures here.

Should the NHS be on Yahoo Answers?

Last week Leigh Blackall and I agreed that patients needed access to high quality information on the internet but we disagreed on how that would happen. He mentioned Yahoo Answers and I and many of those I know on twitter responded sceptically. Why would ANYONE look to Yahoo Answers??!! But my experience of looking for information online is most often centred around knowing the diagnosis. If you are trying to make sense of your symptoms then it is a whole different ballgame. So I decided to make a short screencast to show what the experience might be like.
What should we do about this? Make the existing NHS websites more user-friendly when checking symptoms? Develop better tools for symptom sorting? Make sure that the relevant NHS pages are serach optimised? Or should the NHS be patrolling Yahoo Answers?
I'd love to know your thoughts and feel free to share any stories. But remember this is a public site and others will be able to read it after you!
EDIT: After Fi's comment below I feel I should add that I think it is unlikely that patients will find a diagnosis online but they should in a sense get good triage information. Is this a serious symptom that I need to go to the doctor with, or can I leave it for a few months to see if it goes away?
I've blogged about fear of Dr Google before. We should be helping Dr Google to perform better, and we should be able to give guidance to patients on where they can get sensible information online.

How can we involve (e)patients in medical education?

I have some ideas about this but I would really love to hear from (e)patients.

How do you think you could contribute to medical education? Do you think that students and doctors could learn from reading the blogs of (e)patients or seeing what the hot topics are in discussion forums? How would you feel about letting a medical student take your history in Second Life? How can we help medical students develop the skills to support patients negotiate the online world?