It occured to me today that of all the places I have worked that one of the most unusual was the PLAB test set up at the General Medical Council. For those who don’t know PLAB is “the main route by which International Medical Graduates (IMGs) demonstrate that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to practise medicine in the UK”). My brief tour round the PLAB testing facilities during my brief stint at the GMC was fascinating. There are something like 12 senarios each in their own room within a specially designed complex that candidates have to pass through, with a set time linit for each, where they have to practice their medical skills with volunteer actors playing patients with real conditions.
Category Archives: Health
And now Microsoft
Well just as I’m busy working on a brief for my cousin James on the shift handover idea I see at the other end of the innovation specturm Microsoft has recently acquired Azyxxi. And as Bill Crounse, Healthcare Industry Director at MS posts in his ‘Health blog on 10’ on 26 July:
“The Azyxxi solution came about, as most good things do, out of sheer frustration. One of the physician developers told me his hospital had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical systems the doctors working there couldn’t or wouldn’t use. Using commodity software and the latest technologies from Microsoft, they built a solution that aggregates clinical information from all the disparate systems in use..Furthermore, the solution opens up ways to take advantage of the information worker tools, and communication and collaboration technologies our company is famous for. Frankly, I sometimes think better solutions to facilitate communication and collaboration in healthcare are perhaps more important to the industry and to patient safety than tools that simply help us assimilate and document patient information.”
Very interesting. Nicely, his blog includes one comment which ends with the words: “Good luck – the guys at NHS in the UK really need to talk to you about this…”. I guess I better get on with my own weblog based idea pronto.