Quicksilva thoughts...

It has been joked about before: why not get kids off their behinds and power the telly with a cycling machine? This time it is for real, and is the latest addition to the console that has broadened the gaming sphere from the steely dominion of teenage males to the sunny province of the family. The Wii Balance Board has been released for the Nintendo Wii.

The accessory essentially measures a user’s weight, centre of gravity, and if the user should divulge their height, it will calculate their body mass index (yes, I really am 7ft tall). Plug all this into the Wii and it will guide you through four fitness categories: aerobic exercise, muscle workouts, Yoga poses and balance games. These can be undertaken as a personal pursuit, or likely to be more appealing, as a competiton between friends and family.

Of course, this is no substitute for a jog to the shops, a healthy dinner, and a couple of agreeable hobbies; but surely balancing on one leg is better than being slumped in a couch? Interestingly, combined with the Wii’s online connectivity, the technology is now in our living rooms to electronically submit our weight (and posture) to the healthcare practice.

Quicksilva thoughts...

It is great that Quicksilva can help Gloucester Hospitals NHS Trust to provide a better service for patients in England with diabetes.

Gloucester Hospitals NHS Trust is in the process of introducing a new national diabetes reporting and management application, provided by Quicksilva and called the Electronic Annual Reporting System, or EARS!

The Trust, which runs the English National Screening Programme for Diabetic Retinopathy (ENSPDR), aims to improve the reporting process for over one hundred Local Screening Programmes (LSPs) across England with the help of Quicksilva’s bespoke system.

Diabetic Retinopathy is a complication of diabetes that can lead to full or partial sight loss. If diagnosed early it can normally be successfully treated. The EARS system will help to automate the current manual and time intensive processes of submitting LSP reports. It will also improve the quality of the information received from the LSPs and significantly cut down the time between the analysis of the data and the feedback to the LSPs.

Thanks to Quicksilva's new EARS system ENSPDR can collate their data more easily, highlight improvements which could be made by LSPs in diagnosis and help them better identify those patients at risk.

Quicksilva thoughts...

For some time, big internet companies have been leading the way with internet technology but are they starting to lose their creative innovation? Or could it be that they are not seeing the potential of certain ideas that are pitched by present internet entrepreneurs?

Sites like YouTube and Facebook are just two examples of websites that have got everybody talking about our daily life and they were created by people from the 'MTV generation'. Could this be the problem – big internet companies aren't employing enough young savvy internet gurus?

Hopefully these two websites will inspire many people to have a go at challenging the big internet companies.

Quicksilva thoughts...

While I am all for the new technology in our ever modernising world I am also a stickler for good old fashioned talking. I can’t help but think that all of the emailing that goes on these days leads us to a culture where we all hide behind our screens and lose sight of some good old fashioned core skills like the art of conversation and social interaction. What will become of future generations if they are brought up with their first instinct being a computer as means of communication instead of their mouths?

Quicksilva thoughts...

With the push to deliver improved services through a more effective Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP), multi-agency collaboration model there will, without doubt, be an increase in information sharing between local agencies. As we found people are still happy to share information in return for improved service provision but we must not read this to mean that the current data losses are acceptable. There is lots of Information Governance (IG) guidance available to authorities and many have adapted this good practice to define a best fit IG framework for their particular organisational entity; yet many organisations strive to have this fully implemented across the organisation through a lack of top level support or commitment. This needs to change as does the need to ensure that is re-designed and integrated to accommodate the new LSP operating model. IG is not difficult to define but its universal application is certainly a challenge. This should not be an excuse for not sharing information in support of improving service and in particular the consumer experience.