Thursday 27 February 2014

52 weeks of public health research, part 8

Posted by Bronia Arnott and Simon Howard

From Bronia Arnott: Healthy snacks for a meeting at the Human Nutrition Research Centre.

From Bronia Arnott: not so healthy snacks when it is my turn to cater a meeting.

From Simon Howard: the newly opened Beautiful Science exhibition at the British Library which charts the history of data visualisation, including a whole (brilliant) section on public health. 

From Simon Howard: this cartogram is from the Chief Medical Officer's forthcoming annual report, which I'm editing. It represents the number of fast food outlets per person at local authority level (darker = more), with the area of local authorities distorted to be proportional to the population. It raises really interesting questions about association with obesity, and shows the complexity of public health - we know there's an association between population density of fast food outlets and deprivation, but there are also weird outliers like Westminster, which is likely related to tourism, and coastal towns, which is likely related to fish and chip shops.


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Just to remind you:

Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in my life, I foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on my own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send me an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and I’ll post them as soon as I can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.

Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.

Also, this doesn’t mean we wont also be posting words. You word-based posts are, as always, much appreciated.

Tuesday 25 February 2014

A blow for translational research – you eat what you (l)earn

Posted by Avril Rhodes and Mark Welford

Congratulations to CEDAR for making the National Diet and Nutrition Survey interesting and fully translated for ordinary people (muggles) like us. Take a look at the February CEDAR bulletin and the infographic illustrating what people eat proportionately more of by income and education, and we guarantee happy hours of wondering who fits into each box, whether the dietary stereotypes you held are correct or not, and dreaming up the ideal meal (culturally) for each sub-group. This is a wonderful case of the picture holding your attention so much more effectively than a written report would do on the same subject, and yet, the picture itself bringing together all kinds of data in one place. A challenge to academics – this is intellectually respectable enough for CEDAR, so what of your Fuse work would lend itself to the same treatment?

Food, income and education: who eats more of what? Foods appear only if they are consumed in quantities significantly greater than that of the UK population as a whole. 
And then you get to the fun part…..

• Fetch my gun, Jeeves. Clearly with all those game birds and smoothies being downed by the high income high education group there must be a new marketing opportunity for pheasant smoothies. Heston, move over!

• And what about the high income, medium education group, tucking into a hazelnut coated prawn or maybe fish rolled in sesame seeds? The boat certainly came in there.

• Having dinner with a professional footballer or Lord Alan Sugar? For the high income, lower education group save all your energies in the menu planning for the pudding – I’d recommend the most wine drenched trifle recipe you can find, or if it’s Christmas a boozy Christmas pudding would be just right.

• The middle of the chart – middle income and mid-range level of education are a real puzzle – average apparently for so much apart from the consumption of spirits and liqueurs, can anyone explain that?

• More tea vicar? The clergy must be in the low paid high educated square given the consumption of buns, cakes and pastries there, the staples of pastoral visits.

• And the Great British aversion to salad looks right.

And the more serious part…..

Some of our pre-conceived ideas are all too obviously supported from looking at the diagrams about consumption of processed meat products on lower incomes, and a greater variety and higher quality foods at the higher income end. As if we needed it another illustration of inequality in diet income related as much as anything else. Bring on the affordable healthy meal!
CEDAR has demonstrated that research findings don’t have to be hidden away in academic journals gathering dust. Research can be communicated in an interesting, engaging, innovative and exciting way. Along with the traditional methods of dissemination through papers, the media, research briefs, case studies, posters and presentations; how about making an impact using animation, podcasts, comics or even comedy?

Thursday 20 February 2014

52 weeks of public health research, part 7

Posted by Bronia Arnott, Martin White, Sarah Morgan-Trimmer and Heather Yoeli
From Bronia Arnott: On my way to a meeting to discuss with public transport providers ways to increase more sustainable travel, but my train was delayed and I was late. Isn't it ironic?

From Martin White: Having been President of the Society for Social Medicine for the last two years and overseen the most radical revamp in its history, it was with some pleasure that I saw its new image revealed on Wednesday 5th February 2014. Please explore the site, look at the new newsletter and submit an abstract for this year's ASM in Oxford.

From Sarah Morgan-Trimmer: This is the new healthy snack table in the office that I share with Annie and Catt at DECIPHer, Cardiff. Public health represented in still life!

From Heather Yoeli: I’ve been doing much of my thinking and writing at the Cowgate Centre, which on Mondays is the main ‘fieldwork site’ for my PhD project. I use the desk beside the main CCTV monitors, and sometimes groups of local kids come over to watch one another making faces at the cameras. This is the scene I returned to after I’d asked one of them to 'look after my things for just a minute’…

From Heather Yoeli: My supervision team have not been excessively impressed with my first attempt at a ‘findings’ chapter for my PhD. And so, on my Thursday day off, I took my children to see the fantastic Judith Kerr exhibition at Seven Stories, hoping to inspire us all with some absolutely brilliant writing. As we shared a hot chocolate afterwards, I saw this stripy gift-wrapped shoebox inviting ‘feedback’ on their cafĂ©. Giving and receiving an honest and constructive critique of one another’s work is an everyday part of academic life. I do prefer getting my feedback directly…


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Just to remind you:

Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in my life, I foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on my own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send me an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and I’ll post them as soon as I can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.

Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.

Also, this doesn’t mean we wont also be posting words. You word-based posts are, as always, much appreciated.

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Protected time

Posted by Jean Adams
When I was medical student, lunchtime training events were held in most hospitals I passed through. The presence of a free lunch made these high priorities for student attendance. However, I think there was only one hospital that put such a high priority on staff attendance that the time was protected – as signalled by a bleep collection at the door. The sessions were specifically for newly qualified doctors in their first year of practice. Staff deposited their bleeps in a basket outside the training room. If any went off during the session, a secretary would respond saying when the session was due to finish and asking that urgent issues were referred elsewhere. At other hospitals, training was something you went to if you had the time and left early if something more urgent occurred on the ward.

When you go to time management training, they always tell you about the important vs urgent matrix. Some things are important but not urgent, others are urgent but not important etc. The idea is that you identify the not important or urgent tasks and get rid of them. Then you allocate your time to the three other groups of tasks ensuring that the important gets done and you don’t end up focusing solely on the urgent. 

Surely there must be some 'pleasant activities' in The Zone?
Emergencies hardly ever happen in research. Which, for me, is part of the attraction. Lots of important deadlines exist – grant applications, conference submissions. But fair warning is generally given, meaning that it is theoretically possible to stop these becoming too urgent. Many, many other things that need attention crop up all the time. Quite often I find these are of the urgent and certainly important to someone else, but not massively important to me variety.

My – not entirely effective – approach to this is to routinely work at home on a Friday. The idea is that this provides me with one full day per week to focus on extended important but not urgent tasks that matter to me – writing papers, reading and commenting on large documents, catching up with the literature. The reality is that I mostly spend Fridays catching up on urgent and some-what important tasks that have accumulated through the week - nudging my me-tasks to next Friday at the earliest.

Sometimes, when my to-do list gets overwhelming (which is admittedly more often than not), I protect other time too. I schedule in a few hours to do a peer review for a journal, half a day to prepare teaching, 30 minutes to make a phone call that absolutely must happen. At the very least this makes me feel slightly calmer that there is definitely time available to do everything. It might also make me slightly more efficient by reducing the number of times I get to my desk with a few free hours ahead of me and have to work out which of the tasks on my list to do next.

But, like making the most of Fridays, the problem with protected time is the self-discipline required to actually do the scheduled task at the scheduled time, and not get distracted by apparently more urgent things. I find this is massively facilitated by having a secretary deal with meeting arrangements and I know that I am exceptionally lucky to have the luxury of even part-time secretarial support. Every time someone asks me directly for some of my protected time I feel I have to weigh up the pros and cons, wonder if their thing is more important than my scheduled thing, make a decision about when the scheduled thing is going to be re-scheduled, feel bad if I ‘choose’ to say no. A secretary, on the other hand, is slightly more remote. Obviously they want to be helpful and will try and fit people in as soon as they can. But they genuinely seem to be consummate experts in just saying no – without explanation or guilt.

This leads me to those pesky people who have worked out that if they ask me, instead of the secretary, they’re more likely to get a yes than a no.

What are your time management solutions?

Thursday 13 February 2014

52 weeks of public health research, part 6

Posted by Lorraine McSweeney and Bronia Arnott

From Lorraine McSweeney: submission!

From Lorraine McSweeney: boxing up left over study materials from a study about nutrition in pre-school children.

From Bronia Arnott: When the going gets tough...the tough make colourful reminders of their recruitment totals to date!

From Bronia Arnott: Getting some physical activity at work - to counteract all of that sedentary behaviour due to sitting around in meetings.


------------------

Just to remind you:

Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in my life, I foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on my own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send me an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and I’ll post them as soon as I can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.

Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.

Also, this doesn’t mean we wont also be posting words. You word-based posts are, as always, much appreciated.

Thursday 6 February 2014

52 weeks of public health research, part 5

Posted by Bronia Arnott, Beki Langford and Sarah Sowden


From Bronia Arnott: The scale of the problem. As part of some research projects that I have been involved in I weigh and measure children, as part of the development of interventions to reduce overweight and obesity in young people. This is an abstract photo of a set of scales! Today I got a letter at home from the National Child Measurement Programme saying that my daughter will be measured soon. It feels strange to be on the other side of public health data collection!

From Beki Langford: On a night out in Stokes Croft (Bristol) I stopped my friends so I could take a photo of this sign. I'd just given a lecture about health inequities and obesogenic environments and this photo seemed to illustrate it perfectly.

From Sarah Sowden: I’m currently scoping a project around evaluating the use of outdoor gyms.  During a weekend trip to London I stumbled across another one…my three year old enjoyed trying out the treadmill but no other takers on a rainy January Saturday in Eltham.

From Sarah Sowden: Dashing home from work the other night, I saw this pinned up on the railings outside the medical school.  How about a free makeover as an incentive to exercise?

-------------------

Just to remind you:

Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in my life, I foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on my own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send me an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and I’ll post them as soon as I can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.

Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.

Also, this doesn’t mean we wont also be posting words. You word-based posts are, as always, much appreciated.

Tuesday 4 February 2014

Better together?

Posted by Jean Adams

As I think I might have pointed out before, I am a fairly (very) introverted person. Mingling and networking and parties are not my default setting at all. In fact, it is possible that these are the things most likely to trigger all sorts of odd avoidant behaviour in me.

My introversion, and the general advice to focus on small grants at the start of one’s career, means that I have mostly been involved in projects with a few close collaborators that I know how to work with and who I know I work well with. But it seems that you can’t hide under your desk your whole life and I now find myself taking part in quite a few big projects, involving collaborations across and beyond Fuse.

Surprisingly, these collaborations don’t fill me with too much horror. It turns out that I’m fine with the sort of structured interaction you get at project meetings. But as I get involved with more and more big collaborations, it’s interesting to observe how they all work differently – and inevitably some work better than others.

Learning to work with people you haven’t worked with before sometimes feels like an odd little dance. You understand where you need to get to. But you’re not absolutely sure you’re managing to convey that to everyone else. The ways of working that seem natural to you, turn out to be a little too anal, or a little too flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, to everyone else.

To make a tricky situation just a little bit more awkward, there is the added complication of the teleconference.

Part of my introversion is a strong dislike of the telephone. I resisted a mobile phone for quite a lot longer than was absolutely sensible (“I don’t want people to be able to contact me anywhere”); and the task that I always put off longer than anything else is cold calling people – even when it’s become patently clear to everyone that a telephone call is the only way to achieve what I need to do (“what if they don’t want to be interrupted?”).

I’m not totally against teleconferences. In fact, I’d much rather a teleconference than an hour on the road, or three hours on the train, there and back. And teleconferences, like project meetings, tend to be a bit more structured than the cold calling that I struggle with. But still they can be odd, can’t they? Especially when you haven’t ever met the people you’re collaborating with IRL. In fact, despite the wonders of speaking live to countless people who are widely geographically dispersed, I am not absolutely sure that the teleconference is a phenomenon that we should definitely encourage.

Like many (most? all?) researchers I suffer from persistent insecurity about my intellectual abilities. But there’s nothing like a teleconference to bring out my imposter syndrome. And at the same time as worrying that I’m coming across as a numpty, I often find myself wondering if perhaps the people on the other end of the line are numpties themselves. Sure I might be talking nonsense, but I’m starting to get the feeling that you might be too. Or maybe only someone as daft as me would reckon that what you’re saying is daft? Look, let’s make a pact – I wont think you’re a numpty, if you don’t think I am; the problem here is the telephone, not anyone’s numpti-ness.


Happily there are a number of upsides to all of this. When things go well I get to meet interesting people, and take part in interesting conversations, and be involved in good research. And sometimes I even think I might be starting to get some control over my introversion.