DownDetector is down. Now what?

Julian Costello Travel Bursaries Opportunity for early career health & care informaticians to attend Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) 2026 in Genoa (25–28 May) The PHCSG is offering up to three £1,250 travel awards in honour of Dr Julian Costello, a long-time PHCSG member. tinyurl.com/4b5a59fj

💊🕶 ANDI BIOTIC IS BACK! Andi enters a new era – we are back with our campaign on antimicrobial resistance, ahead of World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week. 💊 Don’t take them for colds or flu 💊 Don’t save them for later 💊 Take as directed

Not yet joined the Oxford-RCGP RSC? That's ok, bat-ter late than never🦇 Become a member practice and contribute vital pseudonymised patient data. Especially for the winter season. orchid.phc.ox.ac.uk/surveillance... #cihorg #oxfordrcgprsc #research #primarycare #data #everylittlebathelps

How can we measure severity of Acute Respiratory Infections. Data has to be present and relevant. doi.org/10.1111/irv....

Did you catch our Understanding and reducing winter pressures from respiratory disease in primary care panel at #BestPracticeShow today? We'd love to hear your thoughts. #bestpracticeshow #birmingham #NEC #cihorg #oxfordrcgprsc #research #primarycare #respiratorydisease

We are excited for #BestPracticeShow Birmingham 😊 Are you? #bestpracticeshow #birmingham #NEC #cihorg #oxfordrcgprsc #research #primarycare

Will you be at #BestPractice this year? Why not drop by our panel session! 10:45-11:30 / 8th October #oxfordrcgprsc #cihorg #bestpractice #birmingham #research #primarycare

Perhaps a niche dataset but if you are doing anything with primary care data it helps to know what is actually recorded in computerised medical records. #SNOMED 🩺💻 digital.nhs.uk/data-and-inf...

Well hello, @phcsg.bsky.social Primary Health Care Specialist Group of the British Computer Society joins BlueSky. Give 'em a follow if this is your tribe. #digitalhealth #medsky #medtwitter

I have put English #QOF data for the 2024-25 year up on the QOF Database website. As usual 10% of the work is the data itself and the rest is keeping up with organisational changes in the NHS. www.gpcontract.co.uk

Update on the bat. There are two of them! Thought there was something going on and they have posed for the camera today. If we keep up this daily doubling we will have over a quarter of a million bats by October!

A bat has returned to my video bat box. It has been up there for about ten years before we noticed the first bat. Only stayed for a week then. @batconservation.bsky.social

There is *no evidence whatsoever* that the Covid vaccine causes cancer in *anyone*. I’m no royalist but I respect public figures’ right to privacy so won’t comment on the speculation around individual cases. I am horrified that other doctors have chosen to do so.

Catching up on my reading. This is a careful systematic review showing increase in #QOF indicators when they received payment and decline when it stopped. www.bmj.com/content/389/... (photo is unrelated). GPs see the contract in transactional terms. Commissioners and policy makers vary.

Hepatitis A vaccination rates in people with chronic liver disease are low in England. Important study and am glad to have been a small part of this. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is what, in Yes Minister, they called a courageous decision. www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/breakin...

Granted I haven't read the articles yet so the moral issues here might be more complex than they seem... But I think Wired's mixed up the axes on its alignment chart 🫣

"I've got a brand new content harvester"

I have also presented a non-confectionary based paper on data quality in General Practice records. It turns out to be a hard problem. ebooks.iospress.nl/doi/10.3233/... #MIE2025

I am at #MIE2025 in Glasgow and one of my main educational contributions has been explaining Tunnocks Tea Cakes to colleagues from outside the UK.

Multiple recent studies, including 3 impressive natural experiments, consistently show a link between Shingles vaccines and reduced dementia. This week a nationwide S Korea study added a reduction of cardiovascular events My summary Table. More here on dementia erictopol.substack.com/p/the-shingl...

Smoking cessation advice is well recorded because of #QOF but actual interventions don't seem any more frequent. link.springer.com/article/10.1... The indicator for smoking cessation advice in chronic disease has been removed for 2025-26.

And the winner of this year’s ‘Dance Your Ph.D.’ contest is … #PhDSky #AcademicSky

The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) in the GP contract has changed again this year. Quite a lot has been removed but getting full points will be harder than ever. My summary for Management in Practice. managementinpractice.com/practice-int...

A good summary although not quite the whole news on the value of a QOF point as the average practice size has increased from 9964 to 10184 meaning that the actual cash value of a QOF point per patient has remained static for seven years.

Did the Guardian just confuse the SAS and Scandinavian Airlines? Do they think British commandos put on flights out of Heathrow?

@wired.com Hi, trying to subscribe to print and digital in the UK but getting an error message. Help!

Can’t believe the knives are already out in the stores. The Ides of March gets more commercialized every year.

From Wikipedia. Who could resist a visit?

My birthday cake……an edible abscess…..literally never been so happy 😂😂😂 (Husband and daughter made it on a Cinnabon- my request for my cake)

(1 of 2) Okay I need some help please Team. @katharinehayhoe.com set up a Climate Katharines Starter Pack for those Katharines, Catherines etc with climate science interest. I started one for the Gavins + Gavs here. There were about three climate ones…so I added ALL Gavins… go.bsky.app/CKAZBPR …

My Duolingo Spanish course seems to have moved on from "conversational" to "first line of my novel"

The BBC isn’t perfect and has its faults, but this is the #BBC at its best. Fact checking Musk www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

THREAD This Is The Story Of The The Pernicious Rise of AI-Generated Papers and their Online Impact An Incomplete History Told In The Voice of Documentarian Adam Curtis 1/31

According to Pulse next year's #QOF will cut the number of indicators from 76 to 44. As there are 44 unprotected indicators this year this is likely to mean no change to workload, although could mean a movement of money from high prevalence practices to lower prevalence ones.

For anyone wondering about life in Swindon, this is nearly an hour of the Magic Roundabout. It is only a short walk from my surgery and is on my daily commute. It works really well. youtu.be/CzQunCuQCJY?...

Immunosuppression has typically been treated as a single risk factor for infection and vaccination. Can we use grades of risk? Well, yes we can - the next step would be validation. www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

We’re excited to join Bluesky! 🎉 Follow us for updates on advancing healthcare through informatics, upcoming events, and opportunities to connect with our community of professionals driving innovation in informatics. #AMIA #Informatics ##DataDrivenHealthcare

I am presenting Intensional Generation of Medication Codesets with dm+d at #STC2024 this morning! ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticl...

In Timișoara for #EFMI #STC2024 Just about to start but it is a lovely city, even in the overcast weather!

I don’t yet know the etiquette in this new land; is advertising frowned on? If not, I host a quiz and it’s on tonight. Not the worst kind of advertising since, if you’ve got a TV licence anyway, it’s totally free! Other than that, I wouldn’t in all honesty recommend it. #OnlyConnect, 8pm, BBC2

Are you a social media manager running an account for an organization or high-profile individual? Or do you own a website and want a simpler username? On Bluesky, you can verify your account by setting your website as your username. We just refreshed our how-to guide:

Lovely seeing our guests waiting for breakfast, enjoying the company and warmth. Open every morning whatever the weather. #Swindoncommunity

A song to remind me of the most useful phrases I have learnt from Italian Duolingo. (Sound up)

LBC people are starting to trickle over...here's an ever-updating list:

💡 Here is where the Romanian Tate cases currently stand: Romanian case #1: The court of appeal is hearing the case. Tate appealed the order to move to trial. The next hearing is Nov 19. Romanian case #2: The brothers have been charged and DIICOT is continuing their investigation.