Radiation Protection Xmas Quiz at UCH December 2015

Sorry for the delay in posting this. I'm great at procrastinating........

First I have to state a disclaimer.  University College Hospital, Inst of Physics and Engineering and Medicine and Anna Barnes accept no responsibility for the accuracy of this document and the user uses it at their own risk (so I haven't put any answers in there) :)  All the photos were downloaded from the internet and where there is copyright the photos say so.

Now that is over and done with..... We had a lot of fun and I thoroughly recommend it as a way to learn and get the whole department working together. The winners got mince pies. It also gave the shy retiring physics team to raise their profile a bit in the department.

Best wishes to you all for 2016!!!

Click on the link to see the questions.

Questions.pdf

It's been a year already since the last one - The Foundation for Science and Technology, Debate - "slapdown" from Sir Walport

Held on the 20th May at the Royal Society in London this year's debate was "A framework for making policy choices: bridging the gap between scientific and value judgements" hosted by the Earl of Selborne.

The speakers were Sir Mark Walport FRS FRCP FRCPath FMedSci, Government Chief Scientific Adviser at the Government Office for Science, Professor Angela R McLean FRS, Co-Director of the Institute for Emerging Infections at the University of Oxford, and John Pullinger CB, UK National Statistician, Head of the Government Statistical Service and Chief Executive or the UK Statistics Authority.

The overriding theme was about understanding the difference between risk and hazard, wonderfully demonstrated by Sir Walport's presentation

This is a hazardous activity but the risk of being eaten is small because the bird is helping the crocodile clean his teeth :)

Prof McLean described anecdotally her experience of providing evidence for the international community and how it can get used out of context - personally I found her account rather chilling and a bit intimidating - as she described how her team's report got splashed about the press by NGOs

Mr Pullinger talked more about the need to make decisions based on both evidence and societal values and reminded us that as we continue searching and providing evidence then the conclusions may change and we need to be able to accept that.

I attended on behalf of IPEM and these events are always well attended by the great and the good and it's great place to get to know new people as we all sit down together to dinner and the gregarious mood means that you never feel left out. It's an opportunity for IPEM to raise their profile and I do try and do that by "networking" or making friends as I call it :) as well as being brave enough to ask a question within the debate!!

"Does the panel think that we will ever be able to have evidence based policy making for delivering healthcare and by that I mean a healthcare as a system rather than it being a political football"  I got a "slap-down" from Sir Walport :) for thinking that this was a simple question/answer and that there are many different healthcare systems etc. The gentleman next to me said with a smile on his face "that'll be a no then!"  Of course I was making a point rather than asking a question so may be I got what I deserved.

You can read the summary notes at the link below but here are a few nuggets from the debate: apparently I'm not allowed to quote people so you will just have to guess who said what :)

• innovation is often held back by badly formed discussion of risk and hazard
• Hazard = exposure vulnerability and risk=uncertainty and threat. 
• It is the job of MPs to reconcile the science with the societal values. 
• Asymmetric incentives = easier for something not to happen than happen
• We need to view difficult issues through many lenses
• Rooting the approach to policy and decision making in robust scientific evidence. Apparently we are good at this in the UK. 
• Academics are good at arguing without being rude. 
• Scientific reports e.g cloning or GM crop science are used as manuals for new civil servants. 
• Be prepared to change. It's not a fait accompli
• How do we know who to trust when they present evidence?
• Horizon scanning is very important in government 
• Not too much and not too little regulation. 

The report by Sir Hugh Taylor KCB together with the audio files of what the opening speakers said at the Foundation debate on 'A framework for making policy choices: bridging the gap between scientific and value judgements' are now on the Foundation website at www.foundation.org.uk . #fstpolicyframework

Science Museum Lates - Lets here it for the IPEM trainee network :)

And network they did. In no time at all I had a list of almost 15 willing and eager volunteers to help demonstrate science to adults at the Science Museum Lates (http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/plan_your_visit/lates.aspx)

The Science Museum run a special "adults only" evening - nooo nothing like that - on the last wednesday of every month. This month was a special UNESCO International Year of Light event (http://www.light2015.org/Home.html) and IPEM (http://www.ipem.ac.uk/) were asked if they wanted to provide the entertainment for Medical Applications of Light. On show were: Infra red camera and a bucket of ice, smartphone apps for measuring heart rate, a spectrometer and UV torches to show how sunscreen works.

Apart from a little hiccup at the beginning when we realised that we had nothing to project our carefully made 10 minute tour through various applications of EMR to medicine the evening went well.  We were just one event of about 30 in the museum that night and although the whole event in general was not as well attended as previous nights we had our fair share of visitors.

The UV and sunscreen example although simple proved popular and although the application of sunscreen isn't exactly a medical application it was an "in" to the idea of how our bodies can be effected by light.  The smartphone app was also quite popular - people love finding things out about themselves :) but nothing gave as much fun as the Infra-Red camera kindly donated for the evening by Dr Keith Ison's group at Guy's and St Thomas' in London and wonderfully demo'ed by Emma Walker.

What struck me about last night's event was the demographic of the audience; they were mostly under 25, an even mix of boys and girls - may be not that ethnically diverse but certainly not all British - and it filled me with a glowing sense of hope for the future of STEM.

I'm not sure how one marks the success of the events but all I can say is that we all had a lot of fun, lets see if we inspired anyone to either become a Healthcare Scientist or join IPEM :)

Name Check: Colin Swift, Sofia Michopoulou, Jessica Johnson, Emma Walker, Harpreet Dhiraj, Anna Stephenson, Glafkos Havariyoun, Eleanor Holden, Sasha Rai, Matthew Tedder, Natalie Sizer.

If you want to get involved in this kind of thing please drop your name to me anna.barnes@uclh.nhs.uk or the IPEM office at office@ipem.ac.uk.

setting up the IR camera with plasma screen

Harpreet and Anna posing in front of the IR camera

oooo pretty pictures

The spectrometer and a red laser pointer

Demonstrating the smartphone HR app

Ellie having a giggle with sunscreen

Glafkos explaining..... well you'll have to ask him :)

Reminder: Strategy Review – Speak to IPEM Officers

It’s been awhile I know and although I’ve found it hard to put pen to paper (who even does that these days) it’s not because there hasn’t been lots of stuff going on.

Anyway I shan’t go back over all of last year’s events rather I shall start at the end of last year with the IPEM open strategy review. The CEO and VPs thought we might get a wider response from the IPEM members by arranging a TCon. Makes sense right – on paper – no need to arrange a day off work, 30 mins at lunchtime or at the end of the day, a set list of subjects to discuss 1. Regional structures 
2. Volunteering
 3. Policy work 
4. Public engagement. But no, niente, nada, zip……

Well not exactly I think 4 individuals phoned in; 2 on each day apart from the exec and then written notes from a couple of regional groups. So what did we do wrong? and yes quite clearly we are missing a trick, but what exactly?! Rosemary Cook our wonderful CEO will be summarising the results of the strategy review in much detail in the next issue of SCOPE or may be in the newsletter but briefly…. Nearly all of the suggestions or requests put to us are already been carried out or provided by IPEM but no one can see or hear us….How disappointing…

But then how do I find out what’s going on at IPEM ….. it’s not easy I admit, even being VP. Most of what I find out is from attending the trustees meeting and the communications committee meeting that I chair! Oh and gossip :)  No I don’t regularly visit the IPEM website and yet I should – it’s all there.



And No, I don’t really bother reading the newsletter either – it just looks a bit bland but it's about to be re-launched – all beautiful and shiny and new - look out for it soon. I do flick through SCOPE when it arrives. I like SCOPE and so as it turns out do most of the membership. But since it comes out quarterly it's not exactly an up to the minute vehicle.

One place I do get a lot of info from – not necessarily just IPEM related - is TWITTER. I can hear the groans already…. I’m quite a late comer to twitter and an even later comer to facebook but I’m not going to talk about facebook because that is my private personal space. So what and how is twitter. My initial reticence to twitter was because I couldn’t understand why I would want to read 140 characters of drivel since what on Earth can you say in 140 characters. But a friend whose opinion I value greatly, recommended I just try it and anyway Stephen Fry – the nation’s favourite - tweets all the time. Here’s a snapshot from my timeline



As you can see I mainly use it to collect links to other more in-depth info that I can read later. My twitter account is very work related – politics, science and healthcare. You can create more than one account so if you have one already you don’t have to mix work and pleasure. You can also create an account that doesn’t identify you and in general I recommend that you put as little personal info on twitter (or facebook) as you can get away with. Once you have an account you don’t even have to tweet you can just follow everyone else. Once you feel a bit more comfortable then you can start to re-tweet things you think are interesting, although, unless you’ve got any followers no one else will see it. But as you begin to build up a theme people will find you since twitter will ‘advertise’ your account to other like minded people. The disadvantage of this kind of social media is that, depending on how many people you are following, 100’s of tweets can go by that you never see but that’s OK, you can’t read everything and anyway the good stuff often comes round again. However, To make sure that you don’t miss the important things, what you can do is allow twitter to interact with your smart phone so that it texts you when a particular account has tweeted e.g @ipemnews. So now whenever the ipem office tweets a piece of information, and it’s not that often, I get to hear about it without even having to login to twitter.

Have a go – it’s not nearly as heinous as you might imagine. Happy Tweeting. 

AHCS, NSHCS, HEE, LETB, IPEM, STP, PTP, HSST…… A big alphabetical soup or acronyms that we need to know about?

Here’s the glossary

AHCS - Academy of Healthcare Scientists (http://www.ahcs.ac.uk) – An umbrella organisation that endeavours to ‘look after’ all healthcare scientists, providing a membership subscription service, manage the healthcare scientist and technology registers, organise meetings etc.

NSHCS – National school of healthcare science (http://www.nshcs.org.uk ) – A virtual school that produces a national curriculum for both PTP, STP and HSST training (see below for definitions). Is responsible for organising assessment of training and administration of examinations and recruitment into these programmes.

HEE - Health Education England (http://www.hee.nhs.uk). Part of the NHS, the HEE is responsible in defining how education and training will be delivered specifically for the NHS workforce. NB Local Education and Training Boards (LETBs), are statutory committees of HEE.

IPEM – Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (http://www.ipem.ac.uk) – A charity organisation and professional body that invites membership from Physicists and Engineers working in the medical sciences or healthcare. Endeavours to provide support to its members in the form of scientific conferences, information networks and to provide information to the public about all matters to do with physics and engineering in medicine.

PTP – practitioner training programme. (http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/training/nhs-practitioner-training-programme-(ptp)/)

STP – Scientist training programme (http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/training/nhs-scientist-training-programme-(stp)/).

HSST – Higher specialist scientist training programme (http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/training/nhs-higher-specialist-scientific-training-(hsst)/).

How do they all fit together?

One could argue that the creation of the AHCS is in direct competition to the IPEM in that it is an entity that purports to be a professional body and does all the things that we want to do but for ALL healthcare scientists ~ 55K at last count against our ~5K of physicists and engineers. But then one could also argue we already have that situation with the Institute of Physics (IOP) and yet we still exist and most of us are happy to distinguish ourselves from the general physics community in much the same way I’m sure that we would distinguish ourselves from the majority of healthcare scientists. It’s also worth a mention that the IPEM already have representation in both these organisations. 3 IPEM trustees sit on the Medical Physics Group at the IOP and the President sits on the council of the AHCS alongside ~ 40 other healthcare science professions who it has to be said are quite glad to be able to ally themselves to a larger and possibly better provider of community resources than they are. I think that it is important to note at this point that it is the AHCS that have been commissioned by the HEE to administrate the statutory register for healthcare science professions.

Similarly the NSHCS could also be seen as a direct competitor to the IPEM, and the side that won the fight!! Most of us know that about 5 years ago the IPEM training underwent a radical change, namely that it was subsumed into the NSHCS training programme for all healthcare scientists in the NHS as part of the Modernising Scientific Careers commissioned by the Dept. of Health (DOH). I will not be providing a history lesson here. Much has already been said and ranted about the IPEM losing status as a well respected provider of an already thorough training scheme but what I do think worth ranting about now is in fact that rather than being shut out, members of the IPEM are still very much involved in the design and delivery of the syllabus for the physics and engineering streams of PTP and STP. It has far from slipped from our fingers. However, while members have tried to provide a good solid content to the syllabus we would not want the IPEM to be identified with the slightly chaotic administration of the programmes. But it’s early days and I’m sure that after another couple of rounds of trainees it will feel more robust. Which brings me to the HSST. I guess the biggest criticisms that members of IPEM have hurled at the NSHCS is the speed at which things have been done, often times  before resources are ready.  The HSST programme is no exception. Launched this year with the first interviews to take place on Mon July 14^th the delivery of academic content still has not been confirmed and I suspect that many hospital employers may not even know about it yet, or at least understood their role in it.  Again I want to shout out that members of IPEM have been closely involved in the development of the HSST programme. We haven’t always got we want but we have made it better than it would’ve been had we not been involved. I believe this is exciting (may be a little scary) times for the profession and by proxy for the IPEM.  The IPEM membership should take this environment of radical change and use it’s momentum to initiate change in the way we perceive and use IPEM resources.  Put yourself in Sue Hill’s shoes – Modernising Physics and Engineering Careers – what would you turn on its head?

Being more engaged with Parliament.

One of the reasons I wanted to take on the VP external relations role was because I’ve always felt strongly that scientists shouldn’t be such wallflowers when a largely non science parliament makes policy decisions regarding science, technology and engineering….and don’t get me started about statistics…..

So I was quite excited to learn that the IPEM has representation at the Lords Parliamentary Science and Technology committee.  I wrote about this in blog No.4.  Last week Elspeth Bartlett (IPEM:Communications Officer) and I went along to a workshop organised by the Science Council and the Lords Science and Technology committee about engaging with parliament.

The workshop itself was the first one they had done and possibly a little mis-aimed at times but we did learn more about how the information makes its way into the Lords and then in to the Commons and finally hopefully into law. Click here to find out more.  http://www.parliament.uk/hlscience

The upshot of the afternoon was: If you feel really strongly about anything, you can write directly to the committee itself and petition them about a particular topic.

For example for those of you who follow Ben Goldacre’s blog or on twitter you will know that he feels very strongly about all the unpublished data that drug companies hold. He petitioned the committee and gave his evidence, along with others, last year

Ben Goldacre

http://www.badscience.net/2013/04/my-evidence-to-the-uk-parliamentary-select-committee-inquiry-into-missing-trial-data/

The published report can be downloaded here http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/science-technology/Clinical%20trials%20combined.pdf

Obviously, for the biggest impact we would want a topic to come from the IPEM HQ! May be we should ask the office to do a simple poll to ask members what they think IPEM should be petitioning this committee about. 

A number of firsts: My first trustee meeting, my first communications committee meeting and my first visit to the IPEM offices.

I can gladly report there is definitely a refreshingly cool breeze of change in the air. First hinted at in past President’s Dr Peter Jarrit’s scope editorial Vol 21 (1) March 2012 and now in mid transition as described by our dynamic CEO, Rosemary Cooke CBE in the last issue of SCOPE.

At the trustees meeting we discussed the overall strategy of the IPEM and money of course.  As current President Dr Steve Keevil discusses in the first issue of SCOPE this year, one of the biggest strategic changes taking place within IPEM is the devolving of decision making down to the committees and councils so that they don't have to wait for the trustees to decide on operational matters better decided by the committees themselves. We discussed at great length the results of the members’ survey. If you haven’t read over it already I recommend that you do (http://www.ipem.ac.uk/Members.aspx).  Some of the comments are both amusing and damming! Some good ones too.

At the end of the trustees meeting day I felt that I had learned more about how the IPEM works since I joined back in 1993 (gosh has it really been 20 years!!!). I had no idea the IPEM was doing so much.  I feel a little guilty that I had been dismissive of the organisation for so long.  Yes, it’s true, even though I had been a member of the MR-SIG since 2008 and now VP I had never really bothered to find out.  It’s a 2 way process of course. On the one hand we don't make it easy to find out stuff that’s going on. But it’s also up to us to at least point ourselves in the right direction to get the info. The website is drastically improving but it’s still difficult to navigate. The annual report is a good source of info but a bit dry to read. The newsletter is excellent but like a lot of newsletters I get from other organisations and journals it gets lost amongst the many emails I get.  For more info on Who’s Who click here http://www.ipem.ac.uk/Members/CommitteesGroups.aspx It's a lot of clicks and it doesn't look pretty but we’re all there.

The Communications Committee meeting or Comms Comm as it’s ‘affectionately’ called, took place a few days later in the IPEM offices in York. Again I’m embarrassed to say that I was kind of hoping that the idea floated (not very seriously) of moving the HQ to London would be accepted but having visited York, I take it back. It’s a charming place and actually from London takes less than 2hrs if you get the right train. Oh and they’ve managed to source CLUB biscuits (showing my age again :/) so they’re guaranteed to get me back.  It was a long day but very energising. It’s been a long time coming but I really think that this current configuration of the Comms Comm is going to bring the IPEM into the 21^st century. Marc Miquel is chair, he was brilliant as editor in the progression and guiding of SCOPE into the format we know and love now and he will be brilliant at Charing this committee too. Tenacity with a capital T. You can find the other members at the link above. I won’t steal their thunder but we’re hoping to launch a really exciting campaign this year to raise the profile of physics and engineering in healthcare, inspired in part by some of the answers we got from the member survey so do go and read it (http://www.ipem.ac.uk/Members.aspx.)