Working in supermarkets over the summer holidays can be an education for many an aspiring medical student as, to quote Henry James (and the News of the World newspaper), “all human life is there.” In the supermarket aisles the best and worst aspects of humanity are often laid bare while the checkout assistant struggles to […]
Category: David Kerr
David Kerr: The new prohibition
The NHS and technology have had a quixotic sort of relationship recently. A current source of collective angst for the NHS is what to do about social networking? The behemoth of this new genre in communication is Facebook. Facebook and its micro blogging counterpart, Twitter, have even been implicated as major contributors to the recent so-called […]
David Kerr: Geoenvironmental medicine and technology
The world did not end last month after all. Harold Camping, the founder of the Family Radio Network purchased space on 1,200 billboards across the United States proclaiming doomsday for May 21st. This is the third time he has been caught offside in his predictions for the end of the world. However, around that time an […]
David Kerr: T(w)eaching – using Twitter to teach patients
In the UK, we usually do it in groups – that is teaching patients with diabetes and other chronic disease how to self manage their condition. For example, a group approach is now used commonly for teaching patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, for those moving from oral hypoglycemic agents to insulin or when […]
David Kerr: Using social media in the NHS
We recently had another visit from Barack Obama to the San Francisco Bay area. However, rather than sampling the delights of the city, the President drove south down route 101 to Palo Alto and the headquarters of Facebook. The President was the guest of honor at a “town hall event” moderated by Facebook CEO Mark […]
David Kerr: Twitterology
The NHS is in love with the airline industry. The idea of checklists before operations has really caught on, and increasingly ex-airline people are being placed in advisory roles for a variety of NHS organizations. Hospitals are especially envious of the ability of the airlines to develop and use technology that allows hundreds of random […]
David Kerr: Angry bird medicine
“I want this company to be bigger than Sanofi-Aventis in ten years time” was the opening line from a (successful) entrepreneur I met the other day. He might be right given the resources being poured into creating technology for the healthcare market here in Silicon Valley these days. The concept is straightforward – choose a […]
David Kerr: Deus ex machina
Forget complementary therapies, the big question is can engineering succeed where traditional medicine has failed? Anyone following the online technology bible “TechCrunch” might be persuaded by this idea. Here in the US and on the West Coast in particular, the belief is growing that the combination of money and mathematical and engineering brilliance (and also […]
David Kerr: Would you rather work for Google or the NHS?
Would you rather work for Google or the NHS? Started in 1996 in a Stanford University student room by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the plan was originally to call the newly created search engine, BackRub. Since then Google has become one of the top 10 companies in the world (number 4 at the moment) […]
David Kerr: Gordon Gekko and the NHS
Here in United States, the latest must have app contains software that blocks any mention of the actor, Charlie Sheen. Until recently, Sheen was the highest paid television star in the world but was fired last week after making caustic comments about his employers in public. Subsequently, he has just been awarded the Guinness World […]