Latest News
The Next Generation:
On 9 and 10 June the next generation of health informaticians from across the Farr Institute’s four UK-wide centres came together for the first annual Farr PhD Symposium. 26 students from ten universities participated in the event alongside a host of PhD supervisors, investigators from across The Farr Institute and a variety of world-leading researchers.
Glen Martin from the University of Manchester took home the ‘Best Presentation’ prize for his research in Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI) and Hospital Readmissions. Using data from the British Cardiovascular Interventional Society, Glen’s PHD is seeing him develop a model that will predict clinical risk for patients with aortic stenosis. The ultimate aim of Glen’s research is to investigate the causes of hospital re-admissions of patients undergoing TAVI procedures.
The ‘Best Poster’ prize went to University College London’s Ania Zylbersztejn who presented her research investigating why childhood mortality in the UK is so high in comparison to other European countries. By linking administrative data Ania was able to compare childhood mortality outcomes in England against those in Sweden. She is now trying to identify where any disparities might originate.
Dr Catharine Goddard, Manager of the Farr Institute Network said: “The PhD Symposium was a great opportunity for our students to come together as a community and share ideas, compare research methods and help strengthen the UK’s health data network."
Read more here.
New Directory of UK’s Largest Population Cohorts
A new online Directory has been created, providing a brief profile of each cohort and a high level overview of the information it collects. Users can filter their searches by gender, age range, sample size at recruitment and variables collected such as physical, cognitive, lifestyle and socioeconomic measures and biological samples.
Professor Jill Pell, Deputy Director of Farr @ Scotland said: “As a researcher, I think this resource will be invaluable in improving awareness and use of these valuable resources, and I encourage the rest of the research community to take full advantage of this exciting development.
Read Professor Pell’s full MRC Insight article ‘Making the most out of cohort studies’. The new Cohort Directory can be accessed here.
Farr Sponsor Opportunity
We are offering our partner institutions £250 towards sponsoring a lecture in the field of Health Informatics. Full details are available here.
Security Certification for Robertson Centre
The Robertson Centre for Biostatistics has had its ISO27001 Information Security Management accreditation awarded for another year after an ISO inspectors’ audit. The Centre has been ISO27001 compliant for a number of years across its Clinical Trial Unit and Safe Haven platforms. Accreditation recognises that information governance policies and procedures for data management and analysis within the safe haven and in its trial work meet stringently applied criteria to promote best practice. The auditors also re-accredited the Centre with its ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management certification. Congratulations to the Robertson team in meeting these exacting standards to ensure high quality, confidential and secure management of clinical data.
Research Latest
A number of papers have been published over the last month:
- Barriers and Solutions to Linking and Using Health and Social Care Data in Scotland
- Acute kidney injury—how does automated detection perform?
- Maximising Acute Kidney Injury Alerts – A Cross-Sectional Comparison with the Clinical Diagnosis
First class Farr students in Aberdeen
Farr Institute@Aberdeen have been supporting two BMedSci Studentships for the last four months. Rachel Smith was using health informatics approaches to study gender and CKD in the GLOMMS cohorts. Roisin McCormack looked at medication adherence in PCCIU primary care data. Both were awarded First Class Honours. The Aberdeen team are very proud of them and hope that this taster in health informatics research methods will stand them in good stead for future academic careers
New appointments
A warm welcome to new PhD student Catherine Fitton, joining the Farr Institute @ Aberdeen in August. Catherine will be working on identification of potential adverse drug reaction occurring in neonates and children following in-utero exposure to maternal medication.
Save the date I
Stata Programming for Social Surveys & Administrative Data Analysis, September 23-24. A hands-on intermediate level training workshop led by Professor Vernon Gayle, University of Edinburgh, aimed at researchers who already use Stata for analysis of social surveys or administrative social science datasets. The workshop will introduce techniques for making your research more efficient and effective, and methods for improving your workflow.
Save the date II
BCS Health Informatics Scotland annual conference, Edinburgh's Surgeons' Hall 7-8 October 2015. The conference is the largest eHealth/ Health Informatics conference of its kind in Scotland and one of the largest in the UK.