AMIA 2016 Annual Symposium is the 40th anniversary of the Symposium. It has "the best of all worlds when it comes to soliciting and presenting the very best in informatics science and practice. In the rapidly moving world of health and healthcare, informatics innovation is integral to progress.
Christopher Buckingham was an invited speaker last Wednesday at an international conference organised by Pardubice University in the Czech Republic called "Care of the Soul in Illness and Health". Buckingham's presentation, Mental health risk, safety, and the lost soul, looked at how myGRaCE adopts a holistic approach to understanding risk and safety management for people with mental-health problems.
This event is organised by Warwickshire Community and Voluntary Action and is at Dormer Conference Centre, Dormer Place, Leamington Spa. It showcases joint initiatives between different sectors – GPs and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) through social prescribing; the VCS and Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust through the Central Booking Service. The event also highlights the importance of the service user perspective.
Aston is 50 this year and on the weekend of April 23rd, the GRiST team at Aston gave a presentation about the history of GRiST, it's link to research and teaching at Aston, and future plans for GRiST as it moves to its new GRaCE profile. The abstract was as follows:
We have been working on a more flexible way of delivering particular versions of GRiST to different service contexts. Previously, we had a single forensic version that was not able to accommodate population variants (working age, older adults, children and young people). This has now changed because populations and services are now decoupled. It means we can produce forensic versions for all age ranges. The drop-down box where the particular GRiST version is selected will show the new ones and we can give any one of them as the default for your organisation.
GRaCE-AGE is a new EIT Health project that was approved last week and will start this month. It was developed at Aston University and will run within the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network (WM-AHSN) under the leadership of Dr Buckingham.
In addition to Aston University (as part of WM-AHSN), Core and Associate Partners include:
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
- Two sensor companies, one in Belgium and one in Holland
Lawnswood Campus Pupil Referral Unit in Wolverhampton is now piloting GRiST. It is the first school to use GRiST and we will be reviewing feedback carefully to see how we can configure it for the new context. If any other pupil referral units are interested in joining the trial, let us know. Mainstream schools are also welcome to try it because it would be very useful for them too.
Development of the self-assessment version of GRiST has taken place over many years. It has culminated in the current version, myGRaCE, that you can try using the link on this website. We are now engaged in a formal trial with Coventry Warwickshire NHS Partnership Trust and you can read about the research process for myGRaCE in a paper just published in Patient Education and Counselling.
GRiST will be training mental health practitioners at NHS Orkney on Thursday and Friday of this week. This will be a great opportunity to see how GRiST can help support and integrate mental-health care in a more rural and remote area than the usual ones in England. We hope it will also help link to other mental-health organisations such as the Blide Trust that we have also visited up here in the Orkney Islands.
GRiST visited Orkney Blide Trust today to discuss the potential of GRaCE and myGRaCE. The Trust does fantastic work in supporting its members and has a great location in Kirkwall with a lovely garden that members have created. See their website for more information.