Events

Morgan Williams, UCL School of Pharmacy, writes about the first event for the School after its merger with UCL, held on 10 January.

Everyone understands the importance of first impressions and tonight really has something of a first date feel to it.

Professor Sir John Tooke

It’s the fifth New Year Lecture that the School of Pharmacy has organised, but the first under the UCL banner. It comes just nine days after the conclusion of a merger process that’s taken up the best part of the past two years for the School.

I’d be lying if I said that it’s been an easy courtship. So, there’s a certain frisson in the air as Lord Tim Clement-Jones introduces our speaker Professor Sir John Tooke, UCL Vice-Provost (Health), to an audience at the Royal Society that is jam-packed with pharmacy movers and shakers.

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Lorna Hobbs reports on the UCL symposium ‘e-Health: Building the UCL Community’, held on 22 November.

Early terminations have been linked to breast cancer, and young people with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than the general population. These are just two examples of findings that were discovered through the linkage of electronic health records in the National Health Service.

E-health is an emerging field that involves the use of new information and communication technology to improve health and healthcare. All healthcare systems currently face numerous problems as a result of ageing populations, an increase in the prevalence of long term conditions, rising costs of healthcare and rising expectations from populations. E-health is seen as one solution to these problems, and has the potential to profoundly affect the organisation and delivery of health services.

On 22 November UCL held ‘e-Health: Building the UCL Community’. The symposium brought together UCL’s vast interdisciplinary expertise (including academics in clinical medicine, psychology, sociology, health informatics, human-computer interaction, computational science, computer science, and engineering to name but a few) with a view to fuelling future collaborations and strengthening UCL’s standing as a research centre in the area of e-Health.

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On 21 July, the UCL Centre for International Health & Development (CIHD) lunchtime seminar took an unusual form – a screening of a film made by a women’s group in rural Nepal which has been working to improve maternal and newborn health. Dr Jo Morrison has been exploring the use of participatory media in research and reports on how the film came about, and the issues it powerfully demonstrates.

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The Health and Society Summer School on Social Determinants of Health welcomed forty-seven participants from nineteen countries this year. Participants came from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea, as well as from a number of European countries and the UK. Here Dr Ruth Bell (UCL Epidemiology and Public Health) reports on the event. (more…)