One of the highlights of the summer for me was attending ISHIMR 2011 in Zurich. The acronym stands for International Symposium on Health Information Management Research and the conference covers a wide range of topics, from the quite technical to the very practical via the frankly esoteric. What I enjoyed particularly was the opportunity to meet people from lots of different coutries. The Middle East was well represented, as was Eastern Europe and there is some fascinating work going on. Also refreshing was meeting several bright young people, some having just graduated with nursing degrees and others studying PhDs. My own contribution was a paper which looked at aspects of the Net.Weight project, the study I was involved in a couple of years ago with colleagues from Brighton University and the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. In the paper, we explored some of the results using the concept of involvement and a 3-stage model devised by Alice Wilson and Richard Casey, who at that time were doing work with the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. Their model has proved to be a useful way to think about our results and to highlight gaps in health information provision. I hope to be able to develop the thinking further but in the meantime the paper is in the Conference Proceedings. The photo shows me in earnest conversation at the conference dinner with a Swedish participant (we were probably discussing Wallander!). 
September 26, 2011
