October 14 2010 (Thursday) - I.T. Projects

To the right hand side of this page is a section which reads “THE AUTHOR'S OTHER CPD PROJECTS”…

I’ve doubled the size of the CPD presentation archive. There’s still not a lot there, but it will grow with time.

Following on from what I shall take as a glowing endorsement of my website of advice for students tacking the pre-registration portfolio on Tuesday, I’ve carried on updating the set questions which can be used as evidence for Section 1.

I have also utterly revamped my website of advice for students tacking the specialist portfolio in haematology and blood transfusion and relocated it to its new home.

I shall leave the original where it was, and all future efforts will go on this new-improved Mark II version. It still needs a lot of work; especially in the areas of blood transfusion. I expect I shall get round to those bits eventually. Blood transfusion isn’t exactly my forte….

September 15th (Wednesday) - Lunchtime Presentation

The plan was to have a lunchtime CPD presentation today. Having got to grips with the presentation apparatus last week I had been looking forward to today's talk. But we had a minor hiccup with today's CPD presentation which has illustrated an important point....

People prepare CPD talks in their own time, much as I write this blog. And people do it at home where they (generally) have a far better and more modern P.C. and/or laptop than is available at work. So when today’s speaker brought in her presentation, the Office 2003 software didn't recognise the *.pptx files.

So I've asked people that when preparing a PowerPoint talk for CPD purposes, if they've created the thing at home on more modern versions of MicroSoft Office, could they use the "Save As" option rather than "Save", and to save as an office 2003 compatible file if they are going to bring it in on a stick.

Alternatively they might bring in the presentation on a laptop which we could plug directly into the presentation apparatus.

On a similar theme, yesterday a colleague asked what happens to the CPD PowerPoint files after they are presented. He said he’d like to be able to see the PowerPoint presentations of the sessions that he’d missed. My immediate reaction was that in four years of doing these talks no one had ever asked that before, but he got me thinking. And after a little bit of mucking about, I’ve obtained the use of a gigabyte (or so) of webspace where I shall form an archive of CPD presentations. Provided of course the speakers are happy for me to have their work. This archive is a bit empty at the moment. I’m hoping it will grow with time.

September 10th 2010 (Friday) - Another Urgent Queue

The problem – identifying samples from wards which would require attention before samples from less urgent souces.

The solution – queue them, in the same way I queued samples from the most urgent locations (a few months ago)

Queue Summary Queues requiring attention :- Queue Queue name No. of specimens Date Time User -------------------------------------------------------- Urgent - General Queues URGENT One-hour turnaround samples 29 10/09/2010 19:40 0 WARDS Four hour turnaround samples   1 10/09/2010 19:35 0 Routine - General Queues GF GF tests to be done 11 10/09/2010 18:43 0 VITP B12s awaiting authorisation 16 10/09/2010 17:41 0 ZHB1 Hb-opathies awaiting analysis 16 10/09/2010 19:18 0 ZHB2 Hb-opathies sent to Somewhere 37 10/09/2010 09:40 0 -------------------------------------------------------- 1 Process queue 2 List 3 Update 4 eXit : P Disc: CLIN Sect: HAEW QMON/APEX Overtype

Firstly I created a list of wards the results from which needed to appear on the four hour turnaround samples.

Then I made a rule:

• If it’s on a queue already then quit else continue
• If it’s not one of our samples (AW succession number) then quit else continue
• If it’s on the list of wards then queue the result else quit.

"WARDS" (in red) is the new queue - let’s see if it works