Cybercafe at the WSM
Posted By Grant Forrest on 11-Feb 2010 at 23:02
Thanks again to the AAGBI for inviting SCATA to run the Cybercafe at the Winter Scientific Meeting in London in January.
We ran the daily gauntlet of the assembled media at the entrance to the venue, which was co-hosting the Iraq Enquiry, but luckily we avoided "Tony Blair Friday".
The venue provided a nice speedy broadband connection, to which we attached our usual motley collection of routers, switches and laptops.
Not so much as a blip in the service over all three days so the venue is to be thanked and congratulated for that.
We're getting used to the routine of powering up the laptops on set-up day and twiddling our thumbs whilst they download all the Windows patches released in the previous six months, anti-virus updates etc etc.
One ageing and terminally-slow laptop was deemed unfit for purpose so I dug out the Linux CD and after a bit of twiddling I got Ubuntu to come out of the box and lo and behold we had a usable machine again.
We are already looking forward to Harrogate in the Autumn and if you are there, please visit us on the SCATA stand.
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Sorting out dates
Posted By Paul Cooper on 19-Dec 2009 at 10:12
I need to try and get reliable data from our theatre system and who is doing what. The data in the Consultant resonsible for the list' field is unreliable ( dont ask......) in the theatre system. I'm told the most reliable source is the surgeons rota. This is available on the intranet as an excel spreadsheet.
i thought automating data extracation would be easy. Courtesy of IT ive got a spare computer on my desk running linux ( was gentoo, now ubuntu)
so i can retrieve the file with wget and then parse out the data i need.
The aim is to put it all into a perl hash of hashes - so extracting other data in the future will be straightforward, and i could even do it as a web page.
The hash would be
{date}=>( {on call}=>surgeon1, {theatre} +>surgeon2 )
so to get the person on call for 4 April :
value for {20090404}{on call} = person on call.
to get theatre surgeon for days of a week , just put it in a loop
for date =startdate to enddate ( eg 4 April 2009 -10 April 2009
substitue each value of 'date' into the formula (20090404,20090405,20090406 etc etc )
then surgeon =name stored in {date}{theatre}
which will give the name on a particular date and rota
(i appreciate this wont actually run as code!)
its possible to expand as well and i could pull data from a number of rotas on the same principle.
this is the spreadsheet
First problem :
date field isnt formatted as a date - its text.
the formatting isnt consistent - some dates have dots and some dont.
So i thought a regular expression would extract the bits I want.I played around with this sort of stuff.
/ (\d{2}) \. (\d{2}) \. (\d{4}) /
2 numbers followed by a dot, then 2 numbers then a dot then 4 numbers
/ (\d{2}) \.* (\d{2}) \.* (\d{4}) /
2 numbers followed by 0 or 1 characters followed by 2 numbers followed by zero or 1 characters followed by 4 numbers.
but it didnt sort out all the dates consistently.
bit more fiddling around should get it fixed though with the help fo the Date::Manip module in perl
But some thoughts :
- Whoever produced the rota doesnt know about date formatting in Excel
- Whoever produced the rota must have spent a good while typing in each date - thats what must have happened because there are different typos in many date fields.
- This must be the level of Excel /IT expertise , or ignorance that many users have.
- And whats the best way to do something about it, if we want to to. Does ECDL or similar cover this , and how far into the course?
i know for purists excel isnt the correct software to do rotas, but for small departments it gets used because its relatively straightforward and available
- introduce a rota package an spend time and money training people on it
- going and having a quiet word ("we've noticed you are doing the rota, do you know about ......)
- Introduce a 'rota template' that all shall use ?Produce an 'advice for rotamakers using Excel ' handout
- Just let things be.?
Welcome new Chairman
Posted By Anthony Madden on 01-Nov 2009 at 22:11
Last Monday, 16 November, SCATA held its annual meeting for Working Groups at the Association of Anaesthetists, in London. There were about 18 members present, split 50:50 between committee and ordinary members. Alan Hope presented the SCATA Wiki, James Berrington discussed education and the ITLS course, while Andrew Norton led the debate on terminology. My thanks to the 3 working Group convenors and to all those who contributed to the discussions. Everyone seemed to enjoy the day, and emails are already buzzing around as people follow up the day's debates and get involved with these SCATA activities.
At the end of the day, following an open committee meeting / members meeting, it was my great pleasure to hand over to SCATA's new Chairman, Dr Paul Cooper. Paul has very kindly invited me to be Honorary President during his term of office. I was greatly honoured by Paul's invitation to follow in the footsteps of my former mentor, John Bushman, SCATA's first President. So, I won't be disappearing completely but this will be my last blog entry.
Finally, I would like to thank Chris Barham, who has been a great support as President during my term as Chairman. Chris was a founding member of SCATA and now steps down from the Committee having served the Society in various capacities for more than 20 years.
Scata Wiki embedded movies
Posted By Alan Hope on 04-Oct 2009 at 17:10
Planning on dipping my toe in the water here. True streaming movies require streaming set up on the server, and will probably not be viewable in hospitals (who take a dim view of this sort of activity). So HTML pseudo-streaming is the way to start. This may not support more than about 10 simultaneous views, but that may be enough.
I have access to a set of movies, made in-house here, covering ultrasound assisted nerve blocks. Really depends how much I can compress these without rendering them useless. I am looking to create a movie library, similar to the image library, for these.
Hope to have some news for the session in November.
Watch this space! http://www.scatawiki.com
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