(no subject)
Sep. 22nd, 2002 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerOnceUpon made it clear to me that I was being a tad opaque about my movements at the moment, especially for those people that don’t actually know what I get up to. So I’ll try to make it a tad clearer.
My father is a neonatologist (from neonate, neo - new, nate - birth, the newly born), running an intensive care baby unit (ICU) in Kent. He’s been in that position since 1983(ish) which was when we moved to Kent. In 1988 he initiated a project (or was somehow involved in its initiation, anyway) which collects data on the treatment of babies in intensive care units in the South East Thames area (SET) (for those of you not familiar with The South, find the centre of London. Everything South of the Thames and East of that point is part of the South East Thames Regional Health Authority, or at least was, until they reorganised things). Anyway, every day, every unit in SET notes which babies it cared for and the level of treatment that baby got (on a scale of 1-6, where level 1 means the baby is hidden by a forest of tubes and wiring and level 6 means the baby is actually helping look after nearby babies and offering useful advice to the administrators). All of this in then funnelled back to the data entry staff (my Mum, yes this is all a tad nepotistical, but I’ll get to that later) who then checks all of the figures and then enters them onto the computer system. The checking actually takes a good 50% of the time and mostly consists of phoning ward clerks and saying "Are you sure this baby had a week of level 1 care, 3 days of level 6 and then back to level 1 again? That sounds...unlikely."
Back when the system first started I had nothing at all to do with it, but for various reasons the person who was supposed to be supporting it didn’t give the worlds best service. Being a complete geek and available for free, I’d occasionally fix problems when they occurred with the computer. When I went to university I’d frequently spend hours on the phone (sometimes literally 2 hours on a payphone, talking my Mum through a fix process while I imagined the screen she’d be working on and the various options she had. I should point out that this was back in the days of DOS, and therefore even harder than you’d think), and eventually I was called on to spend one of my summer holidays rewriting the system. And then, 4 years later, rewrite it again. And to intermittently pull data out of the system, make changes to the data format (the care levels have changed from 1,2,3,4,5,6 to 1,1t,2,2t,3,3t,4,4t,5,7 to v,u,2,s,3,4,5,6 via a couple of other oddities along the way, to name but a few oddities) and it’s actually gone from dBase 4, to dBase for Windows, to Visual Foxpro, in the process speeding up by a factor of several thousand as I learned more and more ways to speed up data retrieval and play around with SQL Select statements.
Anyway, with my current gap in employment spreading between July and November, Dad was delighted to grab me to get some more data out of the system (as well as to update the system to cope with some recent changes). I’m therefore moving back and forth between Scotland and England, spending a few weeks in Kent before heading back to Scotland to spend a week with Erin each time. I’m currently on my way back to Kent again, and hopefully Erin will be joining me for a while. The original plan was that Mum and Dad would be off on holiday and I’d dog sit. When the dog died this was changed to a house-sitting role, and now my single remaining grandparent (my father’s mother, nicknamed Oma, the Austrian word for "Gran") is in hospital, recovering from a broken hip, so they may not go at all. In any case, things will work themselves out soon, Erin will work out when she’s able to take time off work, and I’ll hopefully finish off the work I’ve been doing. I’ve spent the last week trying to finish a report that is going to automatically go into an Excel spreadsheet. The figures keep almost but not quite fitting the previous years reports, but I hope to eventually smack them into place.
So, anyway, I’m down in Kent for the next month (or so) and then back to Scotland for the 28th, to start my new job with Standard Life. And where that takes me, I have no idea at all.
My father is a neonatologist (from neonate, neo - new, nate - birth, the newly born), running an intensive care baby unit (ICU) in Kent. He’s been in that position since 1983(ish) which was when we moved to Kent. In 1988 he initiated a project (or was somehow involved in its initiation, anyway) which collects data on the treatment of babies in intensive care units in the South East Thames area (SET) (for those of you not familiar with The South, find the centre of London. Everything South of the Thames and East of that point is part of the South East Thames Regional Health Authority, or at least was, until they reorganised things). Anyway, every day, every unit in SET notes which babies it cared for and the level of treatment that baby got (on a scale of 1-6, where level 1 means the baby is hidden by a forest of tubes and wiring and level 6 means the baby is actually helping look after nearby babies and offering useful advice to the administrators). All of this in then funnelled back to the data entry staff (my Mum, yes this is all a tad nepotistical, but I’ll get to that later) who then checks all of the figures and then enters them onto the computer system. The checking actually takes a good 50% of the time and mostly consists of phoning ward clerks and saying "Are you sure this baby had a week of level 1 care, 3 days of level 6 and then back to level 1 again? That sounds...unlikely."
Back when the system first started I had nothing at all to do with it, but for various reasons the person who was supposed to be supporting it didn’t give the worlds best service. Being a complete geek and available for free, I’d occasionally fix problems when they occurred with the computer. When I went to university I’d frequently spend hours on the phone (sometimes literally 2 hours on a payphone, talking my Mum through a fix process while I imagined the screen she’d be working on and the various options she had. I should point out that this was back in the days of DOS, and therefore even harder than you’d think), and eventually I was called on to spend one of my summer holidays rewriting the system. And then, 4 years later, rewrite it again. And to intermittently pull data out of the system, make changes to the data format (the care levels have changed from 1,2,3,4,5,6 to 1,1t,2,2t,3,3t,4,4t,5,7 to v,u,2,s,3,4,5,6 via a couple of other oddities along the way, to name but a few oddities) and it’s actually gone from dBase 4, to dBase for Windows, to Visual Foxpro, in the process speeding up by a factor of several thousand as I learned more and more ways to speed up data retrieval and play around with SQL Select statements.
Anyway, with my current gap in employment spreading between July and November, Dad was delighted to grab me to get some more data out of the system (as well as to update the system to cope with some recent changes). I’m therefore moving back and forth between Scotland and England, spending a few weeks in Kent before heading back to Scotland to spend a week with Erin each time. I’m currently on my way back to Kent again, and hopefully Erin will be joining me for a while. The original plan was that Mum and Dad would be off on holiday and I’d dog sit. When the dog died this was changed to a house-sitting role, and now my single remaining grandparent (my father’s mother, nicknamed Oma, the Austrian word for "Gran") is in hospital, recovering from a broken hip, so they may not go at all. In any case, things will work themselves out soon, Erin will work out when she’s able to take time off work, and I’ll hopefully finish off the work I’ve been doing. I’ve spent the last week trying to finish a report that is going to automatically go into an Excel spreadsheet. The figures keep almost but not quite fitting the previous years reports, but I hope to eventually smack them into place.
So, anyway, I’m down in Kent for the next month (or so) and then back to Scotland for the 28th, to start my new job with Standard Life. And where that takes me, I have no idea at all.
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no subject
Date: 2002-09-23 10:00 am (UTC)