Journalist, editor, analyst and trainer on computing, government, climate and data
The health secretary believes technology can help change the health service. The NHS Confederation conference heard how a Bradford GP surgery is taking a lead
Reports on technology from NHS Confederation 2012, including health secretary Andrew Lansley and pioneering Bradford GP Dr Shahid Ali. I blogged about the conference less seriously here. Continue reading “Technology can transform the NHS – but not on its own”
Rather unfairly, on Friday lunchtime at last week’s NHS Confederation annual conference in a rainy Manchester, I tweeted David Williams of Health Service Journal to suggest that the only place #Confed2012 was trending on the personalised panels of people at Confed2012. [See footnote 1] Half the people in the press office had already seen the conference’s hashtag in the list and voiced the same assumption, before realising that Twitter shows a personalised trending list by default – the difference was that David had tweeted the first before getting to the second. Continue reading “#Confed2012 on Twitter: NHS Confederation’s Twixploitation of Twanter”
In late May, most of the maps on this site (plus those I have produced for Guardian Healthcare Network) switched from beautiful satellite images (below left – a section of my map on male life expectancy) to rather less interesting atlas-style maps (below right). They also gained a big ‘United Kingdom’ label over the Scottish borders, presumably to the chagrin of the SNP. But it turns out this and other labels can be removed – with some work. Continue reading “Removing the United Kingdom from Google Fusion Tables”
The NHS Commissioning Board last week published a new list of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), which will take over from primary care trusts in April 2013 in running primary care in England. As I was remapping the list for Guardian Healthcare Network (the map is also below), three things were striking about the new list: it’s shorter (212 ’emerging’ CCGs as opposed to 268 before); there are now far fewer very small CCGs; and the rich profusion of odd names in previous lists has been stamped out. Continue reading “NHS clinical commissioning groups drop odd names, adopt boring ones”
I recently visited the National Museum of Computing for a Guardian Government Computing article, which you can read here. I also took a lot of photos – here are some of my highlights, all of which are mentioned in the article. Click on an image for a larger version and caption.
If you’re interested in the history of computing, both Bletchley Park in general and the museum specifically are well worth a visit. It’s also worth finding out more about Alan Turing, genius, key contributor to the invention of computing at Bletchley Park and owner of Porgy (top-left): his centenary is on 23 June.
I’ve previously written about the history of computing, specifically on Parc Xerox and the word email.
Update, 25 July: due the popularity of the picture of Porgy, Alan Turing’s teddy bear, here’s the chance to meet the bear face to face. More about him here (see end of post).
If you’re interested in Alan Turing, a private members bill has been introduced into parliament to pardon him for ‘gross indecency’ (in other words, being a gay man). More from co-sponsor John Leech MP here, and this is where you can sign the e-petition.
