Alan Gillies: Professor of Information Management

A few years ago, Alan was commissioned by the NHS to work on a guide for patients to help them find and assess health information on the Internet.

He has now updated the checklist which was produced as part of this work, and this has been published on Brighthub.

Don't forget you can keep up with Alan's latest articles for Brighthub by using the Brighthub RSS feed on the RSS menu fom this site.

In a free society, a free media is a key part of that freedom. Health care is a high profile political issue. With the advent of 24-hour news channels, there is a need to fill the available time slots. Such channels often run themed weeks and focus on a particular subject. The health care system is a favourite topic.
This can lead to pressure to find health care stories and this in turn can give stories of limited news worthiness a higher profile than they may deserve.

These days, there is free software to carry out almost every task. In many cases, their performance outperforms their commercial counterparts. You can download some of my favourites at the new menu called "Favourite Freebies".

The media often refers to the postcode lottery of access to health care delivery. The Guardian defines it as follows:

In recent days, AG has developed two new series of articles for on-line publication at Brighthub. The first is about confidentiality in respect of patient information.
One of the articles has crossed over to the enterprise security channel. See http://www.brighthub.com/computing/enterprise-security/articles/9030.aspx
The second adds articles in a second channel: the home office technology channel. This series covers the use of PowerPoint in support of aural presentations.
Find out more at http://www.brighthub.com/members/profacgillies/articles.aspx

Informed consent is required in research, in treatment and for the storage use, disclosure or sharing of personal information. For this discussion, we shall consider consent to treatment as part of the delivery of health care. The concept came to the fore in the UK at a series of high profile inquiries into adverse events at Bristol and Liverpool. Those inquiries described situations where the health care professionals were deemed to have acted paternalistically and failed either to obtain valid consent or provide sufficient information to enable patients to make informed decisions.

Here it is! A new web site based upon the Drupal system. It will continue to evolve over the next few weeks. The intention is to increase the content and dynamic nature of the site.
Some early highlights:
1. Look out for the opinion pieces: you can respond to them by enrolling at the site.
2. Simultaneously with the launch of this site, I have joined the Brighthub blogging community: Find more articles and content there by clicking on the link on the orange navigation bar.
3. Find the information you need with the new Search facility.

Evidence based medicine has become the accepted modus operandi within medicine. And why not? The proposition that all medical decisions should be based on evidence is a no-brainer. The danger is in the definition of "evidence" that is at the heart of evidence based medicine (EBM).

Alan has been invited to contribute to brighthub.com. Bright Hub’s goal is simple: share knowledge about how the simplest scientific idea evolves into tomorrow’s technology.

Alan was interviewed live on the midday Sky TV News in response to an item on political and media pressures in the NHS.
For once, AG was surprisingly uncontroversial for reasons that will be explored in an opinion piece on this site.
The interview was shot in AG's living room, but the book titles tastefully placed for the camera were obscured behind him.