I'm a Published Author!

I know this doesn't have much to do with theology or Kingdom or the usual charismatic historical blogs I normally publish - but it's something I am very personally excited about. I have just had my first article published in medical journal on vaccinations/immunisations.

Long term readers may know that for a couple of years I worked outside of my normal clinical area and focused on Emergency Planning and especially H1N1 (Pandemic Swine Flu). The hospital authorities didn't know whether the H1N1 virus would be more serious than it eventually turned out to be (even though I still feel the death toll was too much for a preventable disease). So my role was to support the nursing staff on the wards with care of H1N1 positive patients alongside working with Microbiologists to prevent impact of the virus.

Another key role was to coordinate the immunisation campaign of all healthcare workers at the hospital. Traditionally the uptake of vaccination of healthcare workers is quite poor. For whatever reason, nurses don't like being told they have to have a flu vaccine. However for the two years I led the campaign we had an outstanding response - from around 90 to 98%.

I wrote the article with some thoughts on why we had such success - and I was interested to see that another article in the journal was by a senior immunisation doctor in the Department of Health - who had also noticed our results and took a more national perspective.

So there it is ... I wonder if I will ever fulfill my dream and have something published in the Christian world on Ern Baxter or Kingdom principles?!

Remembering the Lives of Children

I don't often mention my job but I had quite an emotional day today. At present I am responsible for coordinating the staff and patient immunisation campaign programme against flu at Birmingham Children's Hospital. In the UK we are offering a "triple" vaccine that protects against swine flu as well as two other strains of flu that are present this winter.

I just got a bit sick today of the talk of "targets" and "percentages". The reason why I want to do my job as well as I can is because vaccines actually save lives! Last winter the swine flu virus claimed the lives of six children. I know children die all the time in hospital - but my particular focus is flu - and for that reason I hate the flu viruses very specially.

So I released six "BCH I've had the flu jab!" balloons into the air today to remember the lives of those children who were victims of swine flu - to remember what my job is REALLY about!

Here it is - it's only very short;