My Achalasia
The anastomosis of life and medicine
Retiring this blog, onto another
Oct 29th
Hi everyone,
Just a note to say that I’m retiring this blog and moving onto a new one, to be hosted at http://hughstephens.me . The new blog (Rants & Raves) is a lot more general, and a place where I feel more at home writing about anything that crosses my mind or path. This blog’s previous posts are now hosted there.
For a bit more about why I decided to open a new one, read the first (new) post, ‘New Beginnings‘.
Thanks everyone for the adventures and fun. Here’s to hopefully more frequent blogging and many updates to come.
Hugh
“Seeing the Signs” #ruralMH Tweetchat: 18 May 2011
May 20th
Every fortnight a group of people from across Australia get together on Twitter to discuss issues around mental health in rural and remote communities. Last night’s chat was on “seeing the signs”.
I’ve made up a bit of a summary (that isn’t that short! 1 and a half hours of tweets is more than you’d expect) and have included it below.
Featured in Australian Doctor Newspaper
May 9th
I was recently featured in the Australian Doctor newspaper (yay!).
I’ve posted the article on the One Step Further site, so head over to read it.
I really wanted to push that we need to work toward public health education in our medical schools. Future doctors need to know and understand how to make meaningful change not only on the individual level but be able to contribute to larger-scale public health initiatives. This should include electives in media skills, planning campaigns and how to mobilize communities.
Along similar lines, we also need to work together to get rid of the social stigma that still surrounds mental health issues, HIV/AIDS, sexuality and socioeconomic status (to name a few). Cultural change is difficult (just ask @ckraine from Hello Sunday Morning), and it requires everyone to have a zero-tolerance attitude.
Just a few thoughts.
Catching up with life, and a good story.
Apr 29th
I’ve neglected my blog recently, and most of the reason why is from working on my new adventure ‘One Step Further‘, where I plan to head to Antarctica to cross half the continent to raise awareness for youth mental health.
I’m currently writing a long post on p values, so rest assured that there will soon be a return to some form of educational content.
I’m also working on a very exciting mental-health-related campaign which I’ll provide more details of soon.
It’s about time I share a bit of my personal story with those who follow me and my bizarre world. Many of my friends aren’t aware of it all, and I’ll explain my reasons at the end for telling it.
A disclaimer/warning shot: this post will be long and vastly irrelevant to medicine in the scientific sense.
The timing of this post couldn’t be better with Alison Fairleigh’s post about her past experiences and discusses why she now advocates for rural mental health (side note: check out the @RuralMH tweetchat :p ). Additionally, the Australian Medical Students’ Association recently published their “Keeping Your Grass Greener” wellbeing guide.
Research 1. The start.
Apr 22nd
Another blog-siesta. I’ve been spending quite some time working on my Antarctic expedition One Step Further. Much training to be done, lots of documents to prepare and send! Busy, busy.
I’ve posted before about my research project and the very beginnings. So here’s an update.
I (finally) got my ethics submission through. These things certainly don’t work particularly quickly! I still have to get expedited approval through 2 other ethics committees but these are just to tick the uni’s boxes rather than be required from an ethical standpoint.
I’m getting started on my literature review and am really looking forward to getting down to writing it – hopefully well and truly before it is due.
My project is in organ donation. Specifically Donation after Cardiac Death or Non-Heart Beating Donation.
Medical School Interviews: What I would do differently
Mar 20th
I recently helped out (or at least tried to) a friend who is applying for undergraduate medical school here in Australia.
In Australia there are three ‘scores’ that are used to determine entry: your high school marks, the UMAT (Undergraduate Medical Admissions Test) and your interview score.
The UMAT is a glorified IQ test. Effectively useless excepting to weed out people who can’t afford the registration fees and/or a preparation course (but their role is controversial), it seems to exist only to give universities another score with which to differentiate students. I think it is vastly overused and don’t really see the benefit of its use. But enough about that and onto interviews.
Crowdsourcing your study
Mar 14th
I’m planning a bit of a study about medical students’ use of Social Media within Australia. I’ve written a couple of posts about social media in medicine in the past, sit on the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media External Advisory Board and have a bit of an interest in this field after helping to write “The Guide” (see first link).
I hope to get a decent handful of responses to the study in order to better inform and explain to organizations such as the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Medical Students’ Association about where medical students are on the internet and what they are doing.
Why do we need to know this?
Social Media, the Law and Writing Policy!
Mar 4th
I had the pleasure of presenting twice at the Lantern Mental Health 2.0 unconference a week ago.
I presented initially on the relationship between social media use in mental health care and the law in Australia. We covered Duty of Care, Confidentiality and Privacy, which all relate to social media use and how to engage within a legal framework. I have a brief one-page summary that is part of the drafted policy below. I’ll talk about an interesting issue – that of ‘proximity’ when it comes to duty of care and the effect that the internet has on this area of duty of care at another time.
Secondly, I ran a workshop where we drafted a social media policy for an organization. This was based on that of Headspace Australia so thanks to them for sharing their policy.
The first steps of research
Feb 17th
So once again my blog has sadly fallen behind my busy life.
I’ve recently been invited to sit on the External Advisory Board for the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media and have been doing a hardcore course in statistics by distance education. Finally I’ve been working on my Antarctic expedition that I’m planning for the end of the year. If you’re interested check out the One Step Further website.
But my research has moved slowly along. Very slowly.
Ethics submissions have to be the bane of any researcher’s life. Endless revisions, chasing others’ signatures and so many copies of one form floating around.
I have to do three. One for a national body, one for the hospital I’m working at and one for the University. So much paperwork to be done!
Hopefully I’ll be able to post on the start of the ‘actual’ work soon. At the moment I’m just searching the literature and trying to get up to speed with everything that has happened in the last 10 years!
Today I thought I’d post a few thoughts about statistics that haven’t really been taught to me through uni. Hopefully they make sense and are of some use!
Calculating Confidence Intervals
We all see confidence intervals on all the papers we read. This is a measure of what the possible outcomes of the research could be, and is a roundabout measure of the spread of the results.
How is a confidence interval calculated? It all starts with the Margin of Error.
The Margin of Error is a statistic that includes 3 parameters. Firstly is the ‘z-score’ which is a number from a t-table (magical tables for normally distributed data). You just look it up based on the confidence you desire (e.g. 95%, 90% etc). For example, the z score for calculating ANY 95% CI will be 1.645.
The second parameter is the standard deviation (StDev) for the data. StDev is a difficult statistic to calculate manually but luckily even the most basic of calculators with statistical function can do it for you (so can excel etc). It is measure of the variability / spread of the data. In a normally distributed dataset, about 69% of the results will occur within one standard deviation of the mean.
The final parameter of interest is ‘n’, the number of people in the study / group being analyzed.
To calculate the Margin of error, we use the following equation:
where ME is Margin of Error, z is the z-score, s is the standard deviation and n is the number of people being analyzed.
The confidence interval is simply calculated by taking the mean and adding the ME (top of the CI) and then subtracting it from the mean (bottom of the CI).
So keep this in mind! It helps make sense of situations where your confidence interval is wide or narrow – wide when there is a lot of variance in the collected data or the number of patients is low and vice versa.
90210: The Clinical Years
Jan 25th
It’s getting to the time of year that new students (here in Australia) start their next year of medical education.
I’ve been compiling for some time a collection of quotes and images to use as an introduction and give a few lessons to those about to start the sometimes daunting, yet exciting, task of beginning full-time in the hospital.
