This post was due up last week, then the news about Samantha Backler came through. She deserved her time in the spotlight.

On March 17th, an extraordinary event took place at the Lighthouse in Brighton’s North Laines. The R&D department at Sussex Partnership has been developing ideas for projects – research and clinical practice – that seeks digital solutions to health care problems. Second Life is already a research environment for some of us, and more projects are either underway or at the work-up stage. We are also keen to capitalise on social media for communication with staff and service users, and to make use of apps for community support. For clinicians, the ideas come from practice. We can see the problems up close and we know what we need to do to address them We’re not that tech savvy though. We are not developers or designers. On the other hand, the tech savvy digital community doesn’t necessarily know what kinds of products we need, or how to access a user group to trial prototypes. From a very understated meeting with Phil Jones of Wired Sussex at which we speculated about a meeting of clinicians, academics, and entrepreneurial developers, came Wired for Health. Phil took that basic idea and produced an event that exceeded all expectations. No, I’m not going to be cool about it, this was very very exciting! Chaired by John Worth (Worth Digital)and Lynn Smith (NHS South East Coast), presentations from the health and business communities preceded a superb networking session from which we pretty much had to be evicted as no one wanted to stop talking when time was up. We heard from Sarah Pearson (Health Psychologist), about the difference between what people say they do and what they actually do (e.g. belieiving they watch very little live TV and, in fact, watching over 60% live TV), which has implications for self report about health issues. We also heard from Ribot, a small company that has developed a phone app to assist people with dexterity problems (the Threedom phone). In fact, this was the occasion of its formal launch, so the glasses of wine that were waiting upstairs could easily have been deployed ahead of time for a rollicking good crack over the bows! Dave Taylor (Imperial College) and I presented a live look at the medical training environment and our Brighton simulation, used for the study with people with learning disabilities. This being a digitally capable venue, there was no trouble getting a good broadband connection and even Second Life behaved itself, so that the audience got a good look at the potential of virtual worlds in health care and research.

Upstairs in the foyer of the Lighthouse, Jo Roberts (Wired Sussex) had set up media nooks for particular interests. Virtual worlds, social networking (and yes, we’re on twitter), and webs and apps. Somewhere, I saw small food items being passed around but was never able to shut up long enough to take advantage. If you can measure success in terms of the croakiness of your voice the day after, this was off the scale. Mine was a husky growl for two days as a result of all the talking.

And the outcome? Wired Sussex is preparing a report for their funding body. Productive relationships were begun and are bearing fruit. Ribot is in touch with a posse of service users whose dexterity is challenged by motor, anatomical, and brain injury factors. We, R&D, can begin to hope for some major steps forward in our digital research and product development capability.

Thank you John, Phil, Lynn, and Jo.

Photos by Wired Sussex

#WiredHealth