iMedic

Working abroad

With all this confusion over changes in training and the European Working Time Directive, I've often considered waving goodbye to the NHS and practicing abroad. Actually, it's got nothing to do with the proposals for foundation years and basic specialist training: I just want to live somewhere warmer. This was only intensified (to the order of about 600 billion) when carrying out my elective in California, so while I know that when push comes to shove I'd find it incredibily difficult to actually leave home, I still like to explore my overseas options from time to time.

The Residency Database may be just the thing I need. Created and compiled by medical students as part of an IFSMA project, it lists information on health systems in a number of countries and outlines the hoops you need to jump through in order to work there.

No field outlining the average climate however.

It's not April 1st yet, is it?

I found myself asking myself this question while reading about the Toto Intelligence Toilet over at Gizmodo. If true, it promises to measure urine sugar, blood pressure, body fat and weight on a daily basis. If not, you'll just have to stick to contemplating life and reading the paper during your quality loo time. Either way, Toto Intelligence Toilet is one of the best phrases I've heard in a while.

Score jobs with Jobscore

Rating everything from the quality of the Mess to the availability of out of hours phlebs, Jobscore is a reviews database of hospital jobs, spanning all grades and specialties. Although it is still in its infancy, there are a growing number of reviews and this has the potential to become a useful aid for job applications. It uses a standard questionnaire to score various aspects of the post, coming up with an overall score which then contributes to a ranking for the hospital. You need to register and write a report before being able to access the reviews.

While it is still early days, I can't help but compare it to the format adopted at the US-equivalent, Scutwork, which allows for ratings AND freeform reviews. A quick visit of both sites will also highlight differences in accessibility and user-friendliness. However, in the interests of not judging too soon, I am just going to be grateful that something of this nature is now available in the UK. Here's to the more informed job selections of the future!

Sort your life out

Star Organizer has a good collection of links to lists and documents to help get your life in order. Some of my favourites include a moving checklist, time management worksheet (which I hope will finally help me break my habit of spending more time planning revision than actually revising), and tips on organizing your job search (all are pdf files requiring Adobe Acrobat or some such reader). All this and more here.

Eye-Spy something beginning with G

The New Scientist reports that researchers at the University of Maryland have developed contact lenses that change their appearance according to the wearer's blood sugar level.

"To make glucose-sensing contacts, scientists added boronic acid to disposable contact lenses. Moisture from the tear ducts contains glucose that binds with the molecules of boronic acid, with the reaction causing fluorescence. A handheld device flashes a blue light into the eye and measures the intensity of the resulting glow, letting the user know their blood glucose level."

Lead author of the study Chris Geddes and his team at the Center for Fluroscence Spectroscopy are also working on lenses that would be able to monitor levels of sodium, potassium, and cholesterol. The full article can be found in this month's Current Opinion in Biotechnology.

Jazz up your clipboard folder

Busy house officers and clinical medical students can find some useful tools to organise themselves on the wards at Medfools. The free downloads include pdfs of patient tracker templates, history and examination sheets, microbiology charts, and paediatric revison cards.

Feeding frenzy

The University of Manitoba’s Health Sciences Library has an excellent listing of RSS feeds of a medical persuasion, including details of a rather useful tool for users of PubMed:

“this is a nifty tool which allows you to create a PubMed search and run it in HubMed. The results from HubMed can then be sent to your RSS aggregator as an RSS feed. You can use free text, boolean and/or MeSH headings in your search of HubMed, just as you would with PubMed.”

You can then go through the resulting abstracts in your aggregator, with more cool features available at the site. Check it out here: Hubmed

Everybody's aggregating

Keeping up to date with medical news can be difficult, and judging by the pile of unread BMJs on my desk, it’s something I’m not very good at. This is where news aggregators come in. By subscribing to a website’s RSS feed, these handy pieces of software allow news and updates to be delivered, as they happen, from the website to your desktop.
If you’re new to them, get some background here, a tutorial here, and if you’re still not convinced maybe this article will sell it to you. Popular programs include FeedDemon, NewzCrawler, and Awasu for Windows, and NetNewsWire and NewsFire on Macs. Bloglines is a popular choice amongst people wishing to use a web-based reader.

Most news sites and blogs will have a site subscription available in some form. Once you've downloaded your news reader, here are some medical feeds to get you started. (links direct you to the site’s RSS page rather than the actual feed):

• BBC offers feeds for all of its news channels including Health
• National Electronic Library for Health
• British Medical Journal syndicates its current headlines
• New England Journal of Medicine (Table of Contents via News is Free)
• World Health Organisation

And of course, you can subscribe to this site up there on the right.

Presenting iMedic

Welcome to iMedic, a place where I'll be collecting the latest articles and news stories relating to the world of technology in medicine. This is also where I'll be attempting to highlight the websites, gadgets, software, and hacks that may make a busy health professional's life easier. So, if you're interested in reading about anything from talking drug labels to the best PDA drug formularies, you're in the right place.

Fellow iMedics wishing to share their tips and tricks, or wanting to make any comments or suggestions are most welcome to drop me a line (follow the link on the top right).

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