Alan O'Rourke

The WISDOM project: training primary care professionals in informatics in a collaborative 'virtual classroom'.

The WISDOM project applies Internet technologies to create a virtual classroom in health informatics for primary care professionals. Participants use a facilitated E‐mail discussion list supported by a web site which provides on‐line resources and an archive of teaching materials.

Change management in primary care: design and evaluation of an internet-delivered course.

To deliver and evaluate an internet course in change management for primary care professionals.

Searching for evidence: principles and practice

“Debate simmers in our practice over the efficacy of paracetamol (Tylenol) as an antipyretic in children. Is it just an accepted fact that it works, is there an evidence base, or is it a myth that has its roots in the drug companies?” Primary and secondary care clinicians address such issues—in this case, 1 captured from an e-mail discussion list–every day. How can a busy clinician harness both technology and expertise to answer questions arising from clinical practice by drawing on research-derived evidence?

Another fine MeSH: clinical medicine meets information science:

Introduction: evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires clinicians to tackle patient management by making more systematic use of databases like MEDLINE and using more sophisticated search strategies, to optimise the retrieval of relevant papers. Aim: to collect empirical data on genuine requests for information and search strategies. Methods: collection of literature search requests for staff using computerised biomedical databases at the libraries in district general hospitals, teaching hospitals and a research unit; the ‘intervention’ of introducing a common structured form explicitly asking about the patient/intervention/outcome/comparison axis; comparison of the structured and unstructured forms for completion of these four components; coding of the requests, using a modified Scott Richardson classification. Results: the structured form promotes the use of components from the EBM anatomy and increases the total number of these in each search. Conclusion: building prompts, like an EBM anatomy, into request forms improves the precision of literature searching without impairing recall. For clinical problems, rather than educational environments, the Scott Richardson classification needs modification.

Changing social relationships

In his review of our paper on pro-anorexia internet communities,1 Dr Smith introduced one inaccuracy into an otherwise concise summary. He mistakenly attributed a quotation from a participant in the internet forum to our researcher. Angela (a pseudonym) …

The use and abuse of language in science

There exists a long running criticism of science that it is written in styles that are at best boring and at worst unintelligible. There is also a continuing battle between, on the one hand, the purists who delight in debating the terrors of split infinitives and double negatives and, on the other hand, those who believe that language needs to evolve organically, as long as most of the audience knows what it means. So, one side will tut-tut about phrases like “less unemployed people”, and be shouted down as pedants, and the other side will say most folks get the gist, and be castigated for sloppiness. We hear of university students who cannot express themselves in plain English; and of C P Snows “two cultures”, the literate but scientifically ignorant versus the technically well-versed who can communicate only in jargon, glaring at each other across the barricades. I recently assessed some scripts for a course: one student seemed unaware of apostrophes (or, being perhaps unsure of where to put them, had at least been consistent in omitting them totally); another employed capital initial letters erratically. I would certainly place myself on the side of the conservatives on one issue. Whatever else a countrys education system achieves, it is a failure if it turns out students who cannot express themselves concisely and accurately in their own tongue. While accepting that there was a good deal of snobbish elitism in the “classical education”, the underlying motives were often noble: “The man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit for knowledge, than for being something, and that something recognisable for a man of unmistakable intellectual breeding whose trained judgement we can trust to choose the …