1. Research seminars Thursday 29 th September 2011 Professor Nick Barber Department of Practice and Policy, The School of Pharmacy, University of London Assessing the safety of large scale Health information technologies Standardisation, monitoring and control are important in improving safety; these are areas in which computerisation and robotics excel, and so we naturally look to these areas to improve safety. Most use of IT in health so far has been on relative small systems, larger systems have usually been for background administration. Now we are moving to hospital and community wide systems critical to patient care. Drawing on our work, including the evaluation of two of the Connecting for Health rollouts (the Care Records Systems in hospitals and the Electronic Prescription Service in primary care), I will explore the nature of risk and safety associated with health IT systems. Are they intrinsically safer? What are the issues associated with their implementation and use? How should we evaluate them, and are the classical methods of evidence based medicine appropriate? Should they be regulated? Given that these are commercial systems, how should they be developed? Professor Nick Barber is a former hospital pharmacist who has been studying aspects of safety related to medicines, including the role of technology, for twenty years. His work on improving adherence is about to launched as the New Medicines Service across England. He is a former Vice-President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and a gold medal winner for his lifetime contribution to hospital pharmacy; he has recently been seen on television presenting BBC2’s Victorian Pharmacy. Do not miss our next seminar Thursday November 24 th, 2011 Dear Colleague, Imperial College’s Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality (CPSSQ) would like to invite you to its external research seminar on Thursday 29 September 2011, 5:00-6:00 pm Roger Banister Lecture Theatre 1st Floor Imperial College London Medical School Building St Mary's Campus Norfolk Place London, W2 1PG This month, our invited speaker Professor Nick Barber will give a seminar entitled: Assessing the safety of large scale Health information technologies. There will be a short drinks reception to follow. The CPSSQ research seminars are a platform for clinicians, managers, academics and policymakers to learn about the latest research and discuss current issues in Patient Safety and Service Quality related areas. Please reply to this e-mail to confirm your attendance. Advanced registration is required as places are limited. Please feel free to distribute this invitation to those you think might be interested in attending. These events are free of charge. A link to the campus map and directions is provided below. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/campusinfo/stmarys We look forward to seeing you there. Renata Samulnik Centre Administrator Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality r.samulnik@imperial.ac.uk www.cpssq.org CPSSQ is part of The Centre for Patient Safety & Service Quality