Roger Evans

UN: Global Ebola Response.

The United Nations has been criticised for being slow to react to the latest Ebola outbreak in West Africa. But it is now making up for lost time with a concerted response to help the countries most affected.

Ebola Tracker app.

Developer Bryan Ratledge claims his Ebola Tracker app is the only up to date mapping application of the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak centred in West Africa. With this app, you track the Ebola outbreak just as you would track a hurricane, or the weather.

Home hygiene and health.

The International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene is a registered UK charity set up in 1997 to promote health and wellbeing through improved hygiene, infection prevention and control in home and everyday settings.

Merriam-Webster's medical dictionary app.

24 Hours in A&E Channel 4, 9-10pm The award-winning documentary series starts a new run at a new hospital – St George’s in south west London. The A&E department is one of the busiest in the world. In this episode the trauma team fi ght to save the life of a young dental nurse, Kerry, after an horrifi c motorbike accident in which she severed her right leg below the knee. The team needs to stabilise Kerry before they can assess if it is possible to reattach her leg.

Ebola - What You Need to Know app.

This app is the pocket companion to the Ebola in Africa section of the International SOS website. With headquarters in London and Singapore, International SOS is a company that provides medical, clinical and security services in 81 countries for organisations with international operations.

Deborah Bone 1963-2014.

Mental health nurse Deborah Louise Bone MBE was the subject of the Pulp song, Disco 2000, written by her close friend Jarvis Cocker. She was born in Sheffi eld, where her mother was friends with Jarvis’s mother. When she was ten, the family moved to Letchworth in Hertfordshire, but she and Jarvis remained friends. In Disco 2000, released in 1995, Jarvis sang: ‘Our mothers said we could be sister and brother. Your name is Deborah. Deborah. It never suited ya.’ Jarvis performed the song at her 50th birthday party. Shortly before she died of multiple myeloma, Deborah, a mental health nurse at Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, was made an MBE for services to children and young people. She died at home on December 30, the day her honour was announced. She was 51. Deborah qualifi ed as a mental health nurse, eventually working for the Hertfordshire trust as a service manager for early intervention and adolescent mental health. While there, she set up the Step 2 health service for young people and created BrainBox, a resource for improving the emotional and mental wellbeing of adults and children. She co-created the award-winning Bright Stars programme used in primary schools in Hertfordshire to combat anxiety. In the 2011 Nursing Standard’s Nurse Awards, Deborah’s Step 2 team won in the category of mental health: innovation with patient involvement in recovery planning. At the awards, Deborah was delighted to hear the judges praise her team for working to ‘lessen the stigma attached to mental health services for young people’. Deborah is survived by her husband Colin, two daughters and a grandson.

InDependent Diabetes Trust.

The InDependent Diabetes Trust is a UK-based charity run by people with diabetes for others living with the condition. It was set up in 1994 as the Insulin Dependent Diabetes Trust (IDDT), a registered charity. It is run entirely by voluntary donations and does not accept funding from pharmaceutical companies.

Patient safety in the NHS.

The Department of Health has launched a patient safety section on the NHS Choices website, the offi cial site of the English health service. It publishes data on how hospitals across England perform on a range of patient safety indicators such as staffi ng levels on wards, incident reporting levels, incidence of pressure ulcers and falls, and how hospitals are complying with patient safety alerts. This data has been made public because analysis of incident reporting revealed that 29 out of 141 trusts were not registering the expected number of safety incidents. The government says this is a sign of a poor safety culture. The site gives ratings for open and honest reporting, and those trusts scoring poorly will be investigated by NHS England. There is information on how hospitals perform on patient safety, a glossary of patient safety indicators and links to the Care Quality Commission’s acute hospital inspection model. Clicking on the link ‘Find out how your local hospital performs’ allows you to compare hospitals in terms of cleanliness, infections such as MRSA, preventing blood clots and reporting incidents. It also shows if a hospital has enough nursing and midwifery staff to provide safe care to patients. I keyed in my local postcode and up popped page after page of information. The London Chest Hospital, for example, scores ‘among the best’ on infection control and cleanliness but only scores 80 per cent for safe staffi ng levels.

Samaritans Radar app.

Since its launch in 1953, the Samaritans helpline has provided emotional support to people in the UK who are struggling to cope or are at risk of suicide.

Discord - the story of noise Mike Goldsmith Discord - the story of noise Oxford University Press 336pp £16.99 978 0 1996 0068 7 9780199600687

In this excellent account of the science of sound, former head of acoustics at the National Physical Laboratory Mike Goldsmith highlights the positive uses sound can be put to in medicine, as well as pointing out that noise is one of the worlds major pollutants.