CIRU Away Day 22

CIRU Away Day 22

Training & team building for the Clinical Informatics Research Unit

On the 18th July we returned to the beautiful Rhinefield House Hotel (a firm favourite of ours for the CIRU Away Days) located in Brockenhurst, New Forest, for the CIRU Away Day 2022. With 39 members of staff, most of the department was in attendance, including all members of the EDGE team (Developers and Knowledge Officers) as well as members from the wider CIRU team (such as Research Fellows, our CORE Analyst Programmers, and Operational staff including our Programme and Marketing teams).

The day was an opportunity for CIRU staff to get together in person (after the long work from home period), which continues for most of our staff. It was an opportunity to meet new members of the team and welcome some of our Sri Lankan colleagues as they begin their time here at CIRU, learning about what we do and the systems and services we provide to the NHS (such as EDGE) to further organisation types around the globe.

The day was led by our Head of Operations Baljinder Gill and Director Professor James Batchelor. Both Bal and James gave a general update on how the Unit is doing and how it has grown over the last 20+ years. Further discussions took place involving the entire department and important information was shared and presented amongst the individual teams. This was valuable in connecting different members of staff together and resulted in each of us having a much better understanding of the different roles and work taking place within CIRU. There was a true element of ‘working together’ throughout the day and it was the perfect chance for everyone to get up to speed on what is happening within the Unit (especially how things with EDGE are developing).

The CIRU Away Day 2022 was certainly a successful day and brought the whole team closer together, sharing useful information as well as lots of laughs and smiles.

CIRU & COVID-19 Summary

CIRU & COVID-19

Summary on projects related to the pandemic

CIRU was involved in several projects related to COVID-19 which resulted in The Commonwealth Innovation listing the University of Southampton (UoS) as experts in relation to the coronavirus and included some of our team members as leading experts. More details on how our department contributed towards COVID-19 research and provided support is shared below:

The EDGE Programme: The EDGE Knowledge team worked closely with hospitals across the UK and abroad to support them in managing their research portfolio and specifically COVID-19 research. A large number of trials were suspended whilst hospitals re-organised the delivery of their services, ensuring research continues to be delivered safely. The impact COVID-19 has had on the ability of everyone to safely carry out their role in research led to numerous requests to the team to support and develop functions, including remote monitoring, which gave a great deal of support to EDGE users throughout the pandemic.

COVID-19 Saliva Testing Programme: Members of CIRU including the Head of Development David Miller, Data Analyst Pat Oxford, KITE’s Programmer Bart Feenstra, as well as our Director, Professor James Batchelor, worked on a COVID-19 Saliva Testing Programme along with other UoS staff and colleagues from University Hospitals Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHS). CIRU’s involvement included the build of the online test registration site for participants, data visualization, as well as programme reporting. The programme has involved tens of thousands of participants and won the VC Public Good award.  

RESIN - Research Investments in Global Health Service: Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health from our RESIN team, provided significant expert commentary to the general public throughout the pandemic. He was interviewed on numerous local and national news, including several interviews with the BBC, as well as on international TV and radio stations. Dr Head’s written quotes appeared in all the major UK newspapers and hundreds of international media articles. Through the Research Investments in Global Health study, Dr Head and colleagues have generated data on historical levels of coronavirus R&D funding. This data has been presented at WHO headquarters in Geneva and incorporated into a scientific paper that was later published. More info on RESIN’s contribution can be found here.

CORE - Clinical On-demand Research: The CORE team completed a COVID-19 POC observational study using ALEA eCRF, in which they record lots of data such as medical history, medications, bloods, vital signs, NEWS2 score, screening for 20 odd pathogens (QIAstat) and recording what treatment patients have been given and length of stay, with particular interest in affected health workers.

AXIS - Access Extract Integrate Safe Data: The AXIS team worked alongside colleagues from UHS to meet the need of integrating more technology-based solutions to share data and insights to help solve the global challenge. The teams worked on data integration and analysed real-time clinical information in order to understand high level clinical risk stratification and monitor the progression in COVID-19 patients.

The Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health: The team of Digital Health Fellows from Sri Lanka who form part of the Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health, along with CIRU Director Professor James Batchelor and Professor Jo Nurse, launched an online platform where digital health solutions can be re-used and offer support during the crisis. It also helped to form better collaborations among digital health solution partners and other agencies.

CIRU's Ukrainian Electronic Health Needs Survey

CIRU’s Ukrainian

Electronic Health Needs Survey

Some of you might already know that EDGE belongs to the University of Southampton’s department: The Clinical Informatics Research Unit (CIRU). From time to time we like to share other news and projects that happen within the unit, just so people can learn more about CIRU and what we are all about. A really important piece of research that is currently taking place is the Ukrainian Electronic Health Needs survey, that colleagues from CIRU are leading on, along with another University of Southampton department, The Centre for Population Change (CPC).

CIRU’s Senior Research Fellow Dr Michael Head and Research and Insight Analyst Dr Ken Brackstone launched the survey, ‘Health Needs Survey for Ukrainian displaced persons and refugees’ on 18th April 2022 and as of the 19th of May, over 6300 participants have completed the survey and the data is ongoing.

The research survey is aimed at residents of Ukraine, who have fled the country or are displaced but still within Ukraine. The purpose of this research is to find out the current health concerns and issues of the refugee and displaced populations. The survey asks questions that include what access the participants have to healthcare, vaccination against COVID-19, access to essential medicines as well as to sanitary products, and oral, skin and eye health. The intended outcome is that the results can support decision-making on issues such as logistics and healthcare needs, as well as improve on the quality of life and care of the Ukrainian population.

The findings are being disseminated to humanitarian and health stakeholders to support their response in helping these vulnerable groups.

Below is a quote from Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow, who is leading on this piece of research at CIRU:

“With any conflict, there are a huge number of urgent knowledge gaps. This study can support the humanitarian response by provide information on population movement and health needs in real-time”

For further information, visit CIRU’s webpage here.

Me, myself & surveys

Me, myself & surveys

By Dr Ken Brackstone, CIRU Research & Insight Analyst

Over the years, I have acquired somewhat of a reputation amongst my colleagues at the Clinical Informatics Research Unit (CIRU) for being “mildly” obsessed with designing and running online surveys. Erm, I’ll have you know that I do not have a foggiest idea how this rumour could have started…

*Ahem*

Oh, alright - running surveys ARE my favourite part of my job. There aren’t (too) many things more thrilling than utilising surveys to answer complex research questions and contribute to important knowledge gaps in the world. Knowledge is power, after all, and the rich knowledge that you can obtain from surveys contain potential for subtle waves of impact if you know what to ask and how to package your findings. Hint: Ideally with a little red ribbon on top!

My passion for designing surveys began during my 3-year PhD in social psychology, which I completed at the University of Southampton in 2015. It was during this period that my love for running surveys developed, which was a direct result of designing and implementing surveys on thousands of participants in the laboratory and online. My PhD focused on understanding the power of nostalgia – specifically, how nostalgia can be effectively used to “fend off” the harmful effects of loneliness. After manipulating loneliness and making people feel nostalgic in the lab (using sophisticated survey designs – such fun), it turns out that nostalgia is pretty good for you. Feeling disconnected from those around you? Whack on a bit of Spice Girls (or whatever floats your boat) and you’ll soon replenish those feelings of connection.

I joined CIRU shortly after finishing my PhD to work on a clinical pilot project – this was back when there were just 14 people employed in the group. I was the first and original academic in the unit, which, at the time, predominantly focused on EDGE, our clinical trials management programme. The department was vastly different back then compared to present day… in case you didn’t know, CIRU currently employs over 50 staff and is home to a variety of different service and research groups. I remember a few months after joining, I announced to the team that I had intended to trial the unit’s first ever survey administered on our EDGE users – titled “The EDGE Usability Survey”. “What did users really think of EDGE?” I set out to ask.

*Cue lots of worried looks amongst my colleagues’ faces – I mean, who on earth was I to suddenly waltz in and disturb the peace?*

After a month of surveying a modest sample of EDGE users, the findings revealed that people were generally very happy with EDGE and the magical things that it can do. A few niggles here and there, but on the whole, survey feedback was good. Phew! A key take-home message was – and forever continues to be – how fundamental training is to perceptions of usability and satisfaction amongst new users. If a new user is thrown in the deep end with no context on how and why they should use it, then resentment will soon harvest and unveil itself in subtle ways. The survey was implemented 3 years in a row and, with the upcoming arrival of EDGE 3 in the coming months, I am sure that the survey will be administered again very soon.

Jump forward to 2022 and I cannot begin to explain my surveying antics! In my role, I am proud to wear a variety of fashionable hats. On the EDGE side, I am an event organiser of the annual EDGE User Conference, often utilising feedback from delegate surveys to guide planning decisions. I am also a data and insight analyst, often pulling out behavioural statistics from Google Analytics to inform EDGE 3 functionality ideas to the Knowledge team. On the academic side, I work alongside some brilliant people in conducting surveys on important current issues with a health or clinical angle. For example, during the past two years since the pandemic, I successfully led a series of online and community surveys to understand sociodemographic predictors of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in sub-Saharan African countries, such as Ghana and Togo. These findings assisted Ghanaian policymakers in understanding how and who to target in COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. I am also currently running an online Health Needs survey for Ukrainian migrants and internally displaced people, with the aim to report our crucial findings to national humanitarian and medical organisations to direct support to those who desperately need it.

Data makes the world go round. And surveys are one way to collect new data and translate it into actions that can deliver benefits. I am proud to be in research, and I look forward to seeing what new and exciting surveys I can help deliver in the future. All this talk of surveys… it seems only fitting to end with a survey question, doesn’t it…?

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Its about time

Its about time

By Lindsay Young, CIRU Programme & Operational Specialist Support Officer

Professor James Batchelor, Director of CIRU and founder of EDGE recently contributed to eNews, the weekly newsletter keeping the University of Southampton’s Faculty of Medicine staff up to date with the latest announcements and news. A few times a year, James writes the “Medically Speaking Blog” for eNews, with various topics ranging from the UK’s emergence from the COVID-19 lockdown to reflecting on the importance of time.

His recent blog, “Making time”, was featured in eNews on 4th February 2022. In this piece, James discusses the absence of time: time for meetings, time for emails, and time for others, never mind time for ourselves.

Quote from James: “Unless we can change the turning of our blue marble planet, I believe we’ll be stuck with only 24 hours. It therefore all depends on how we use time.”

Do you feel like your day is out of your control or you have too much on? Someone on a podcast famously once said, “We all have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé”. As James deftly points out, on any given week he could have 33.5 hours of meetings scheduled, leaving only 6.5 hours left to do anything else (assuming he doesn’t eat!) and doesn’t work more than 40 hours a week. One must wonder how many hours of meetings Beyoncé has scheduled in a week. The reality of everyone having the ‘same 24 hours’ simply does not exist. “We need to be better gatekeepers to our diaries and, I dare say, our emails.” It is up to us, as James notes, to manage our time and be mindful of how we use other people’s time.

For more insight and to learn about the potential benefits of chucking your smartphone out the window, read James’s blog by clicking here.

A day in the life of a Knowledge Officer

A day in the life

of a Knowledge Officer

To be honest, one of the reasons I enjoy being a Knowledge Officer (KO) is that the days are never the same. I wouldn’t be able to stay in a job where the days are similar with the same repetitive tasks. Doing the same thing repeatedly always reminds me one of those movie plots where the main characters keep reliving the same day until they find a way to break the vicious cycle. Luckily, the KO position has a broad range of responsibilities and could be described like a ‘Jack of all trades’. Therefore, it keeps my professional life interesting and constantly providing new challenges.

Whenever someone asks me what my job is and I say Knowledge Officer, this usually leads to a couple of minutes of questions about what a KO actually is. My explanation generally revolves around the concept that is a mixture between account/project/product management for an IT clinical research organisation. Normally, it is also useful to describe some of the duties to provide a better picture with the explanation. These duties include, in first place, the support to our users, such as replying to data management, reporting, and training queries. On the other hand, we also have to manage specific projects that differ for each KO within the team (in my case the EDGE/CPMS integration for UK) and deal with enquires of other organisations that want to collaborate with or use EDGE.

Furthermore, we need to envision how EDGE will look in the future by trying to understand the ever-changing clinical research environment. Therefore, we need to keep up to date with developments within clinical research, trends, and changes to regulation. An additional challenge is the fact that EDGE is used in various countries, so we need to have a basic understanding of the particularities of each of them. Ideally, any new functionality would be useful worldwide and benefit most of our users for each of the different countries.

As a KO, we are quite often in a position of a mediator. A good example of this is mediation between EDGE users and the CIRU development team to develop new functionalities. Consequently, we must be able to promote discussions, listen to different point of views, and steer the discussion into a realistic shared goal. The ability to create good working relationships with people of different areas and levels of seniority is essential. In my opinion, one of the most important duties as a KO is to facilitate discussions which can lead to the enhancement of the EDGE system, which then becomes valuable to our users.