This blog "Welcome to the QUAD" is 20 years old

Yesterday, this blog celebrated its 20th birthday. That first post seems an age away now -

Welcome to the Hodges Health Career - Care Domains Blog

https://hodges-model.blogspot.com/2006/04/

Back then, I was full-time and on a secondment with the NHS's National Programme for Information Technology:

Independent report: Making IT work: harnessing the power of health information technology to improve care in England. Published 7 September 2016

House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts - The National Programme for IT in the NHS: an update on the delivery of detailed care records systems - Forty-fifth Report of Session 2010–12

In that first post, several links take you to the former website which is now archived, as per the note in the sidebar. Similar links have been updated to the web.archive.org site, but some may have been missed. Other links may be plain broke.

The blog began as an acknowledgement of the former site's limitations, hence all the posts on Drupal the content management system.* The intention was to create a stop-gap. So much for that! I still have the 'new' site in my head.

Personally, there's been much change: as ever in life, a mix of sadness and great joy. Regards the former, a manager from 1985 into the 90s, colleague and friend David McKendrick died in 2009. And coinciding with personal bereavements, Brian Hodges in 2022. I do miss chats with both of them.

With periodic backups of the blog's content (and old website 1998-2015), there been one effort at a spring clean. Posts that are poor (what was I thinking?), or items that are clearly time-limited - event announcements have been deleted. Many more no doubt remain with images - banners - that will be removed at some point. With 3381 (inc.) posts published, it is quite an onerous, yet rewarding task.

During the two decades I would like to thank researchers who have discovered Hodges' model, recognised (either) its value, utility, relevance and cited the model in their studies/projects.

Thanks too to several co-authors whose patience and understanding in working with me, their recognition of the model and value in their work, and assistance to assure open access is invaluable to bring Hodges' model and this project to the attention of a global audience and community.

If I can help you with Hodges' model - acknowledgement not a requirement(!): please let me know.

The online presence has been about the model, not business, or commerce, so there's a lack of analytics. There's a project for someone, as I notice 'Blog Analysis' as an online research method. 

People occasionally email and provide encouragement regards the content.  In a way the blog is my thesis*. 

Amid the time-dependent content, there may be much here that can demonstrate:

• the holistic bandwidth of Hodges' model
• the scope of application of Hodges' model
• the transdisciplinary potential of Hodges' model 
• how to apply the model, or at least this practitioner's use
• the visual appreciative dimension through the model's presentation to reveal the relational nature of the situation / context at hand
• many remaining questions are also to be found.

Thank you for your visiting! Here's to another 20 years ;-) !?

*I still live in hope: it's called dreaming.

Theatres of War and Healing

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Theater of War Productions presents community-specific, theater-based projects that address pressing public health and social issues.	Wounded Ukrainian veterans find healing on stage c/o Reuters

Previously: 'theatre' : 'war' : 'public (mental) health' 

What! Nursing reduced to objects! Do you realise what you're saying?

Wittgenstein to the rescue?

Revisting a theme, and while it is not new - as in use of objected oriented approaches in health informatics; as a nurse, to suggest there's a need to view the elements of care systems as a series of objects surely runs counter to nursing's theory, practice, professional standing and values.

Or, does Wittgenstein come to the rescue in his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'?

'2.01231 In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities'.

[My emphasis - and as ever high degree of selectivity.] 

In reading 'internal qualities' I can equate internal with a person; and qualities with subjectivism, what is inherently seen as humanistic, a set of characteristics, and properties. Can it be argued that in the context of healthcare and person-centredness we can also take 'internal' as potentially referring to what happens in the mind, an individual's mental life, for example? This can be applied physically too. To bodily properties, which ultimately are internal genetically, and influenced by - expressed in-part - by the external environment.

While I sort books, creating space, there is the small matter that Wittgenstein walked away from philosophy after the Tractatus was published. Then, realising he had not answered the questions concerning human language and reality, he returned to Cambridge and his studies, with Philosophical Investigations published after his death.

Does this invalidate the thoughts above?

Another post to follow drawing from the Tractatus. 

Previous posts:

Reflection: programming and caring II

Abstract [working] Hodges’ model as a mathematical object, a lens for social care and inclusion: category theory or category mistake?

Person to object: Surely you're joking* ...!

Complexity science as a frame; or, a frame for complexity science?

In reading for WCCS later this month, I wonder if Braithwaite et al. (open access) may have found Hodges' model useful in addressing both the learning objectives and questions they raise in their chapter; and as a response to the recommendations?

Braithwaite J, Ellis LA, Churruca K, et al. Complexity Science as a Frame for Understanding the Management and Delivery of High Quality and Safer Care. 2020 Dec 15. In: Donaldson L, Ricciardi W, Sheridan S, et al., editors. Textbook of Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management [Internet]. Cham (CH): Springer; 2021. Chapter 27. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585611/ doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-59403-9_27

' Learning Objectives and Questions Covered in the Chapter

• How does a linear view of improvement contrast with a complexity science approach? 
• The complexity frame makes it harder to manage and deliver high quality and safer care — does it therefore need to be rejected in favour of simpler improvement models?
• What examples can be brought to bear to show how studies in the complexity frame can lead to good outcomes and positive change?'

'In addition, in homing in on any part of a CAS, we can discern elements of both selfsimilarity and local nuances. Self-similarity can manifest fractally, at different scales (e.g., features of the culture of the organisation at the team level approximate to that of the culture of the department, and then division, and then the whole organisation) or laterally (e.g., one department looks comparable structurally to another). It might seem paradoxical, but healthcare levels or departments, despite being self-similar in some respects, also each operate as unique entities. There are always localised contextual, cultural and structural distinctions. Such local nuances occur as the result of the particular configurations of agents (e.g., nurses, doctors, quality managers, patients) following their internalised rules and shared mental models (e.g., put the patients first, project a good reputation to the outside world, prioritise safety) in that unique setting.' pp.378-379.

'Bringing clinicians from different departments together with the patient as the focus, provided a deeper understanding of other’s roles and barriers, helped create a shared mental model, and fostered a whole-of-system approach to the care for patients with this condition.' p.382.

[CAS - Complex Adaptive System]
 

'Recommendations

1. Sensitise those with responsibility for leading, managing, improving or researching care settings to a systems view. 
2. Train sufficient staff in the tools of complexity: FRAM, network analyses, system dynamics modelling, process mapping, and the like. 
3. Approach quality and safety and risk management activities with a knowledge of complexity science, sense-making, and non-linearity rather than as a set of linear problems amenable to simplistic causal change logic. 
4. Consider how our studies, borrowing from complexity theory, have resisted simplifying the challenges, but have nevertheless made progress in understanding care systems and their improvement.' p.389.

 [FRAM - Functional Resonance Analysis Method]

 I will include this in my presentation, duly cited:

 'Complexity science as a frame: or, frame for complexity science?'

Apollo - Artemis II and the Joy of Earth

Since Artemis II was launched, several more-senior people in the media have been interviewed, with their reflections on certain lunar events in 1969 with the Apollo programme.

 

I too remember being woken up, taking several giant steps down the stairs and huddling around the black & white TV set in the early hours. I'm so glad I did that.

 

Thanks mum and dad. X

 

Following the livestream from Artemis, it's brilliant to see Christina Koch and Victor Glover onboard too.

 

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art002e008487 (April 4, 2026) - NASA astronaut and Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch peers out of one of the Orion spacecraft's main cabin windows, looking back at Earth, as the crew travels towards the Moon. Image Credit: NASA

"I have not complained about the weather one single time. I'm glad there is weather. I've not complained about traffic. I'm glad there are people around. One of the things that I did when I got home - I went down to shopping centers, and I'd just go around there, get an ice cream cone or something, just watch the people go by, and think: "Boy, we're lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the Earth? We are living in the garden of Eden."                     Alan Bean. Apollo 12

Image: NASA

Text: https://www.livingspace.earth/home/2018/5/remembering-alan-bean
 

Previously: 'Apollo' : 'exploration' : 'moon' 

Launch of National Knife Crime Centre

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Is this a knife I see before me? Or is it something else?   Am I being duped and taken for a fool? But, nobody will bother me now! I'm ready...!   I don't think this is right.   Either way, I'm asking for trouble?   Will anybody else listen?	Should I risk trying to buy a knife? How? Shop, or online? Do I look 18? I've seen the signs by the tills. Can I pass as an 18 year old? Should I pick it up and take it? Or, do I leave it exactly where it is hidden?
Do I really need a knife,  because he/she/they have one? Can I ask a friend? My cousin? No they'd grass on me. Could I pay that 5th year? Ben Kinsella Trust	NATIONAL CENTRE FOR KNIFE CRIME   Ronan's Law   ITV News [UK] - 'Bereaved families welcome launch  of national knife crime centre'

My sources: BBC Radio 4 'Today' 2nd April 2026.

Previously: 'crime' : 'knives' : 'law'

Information Design and Sense-Making c/o Dervin

'Information Design: Something New, Something Old

... I want in this chapter to challenge the central idea that information design is a new idea. Reducing the issues briefly to a polarity, it is useful to start by considering two ways to conceptualize information. One way, implicit in the above assumptions, is that information is something that describes an ordered reality and has some knowable, or at least idealized, isomorphic relationship to that reality (i.e., it represents in an identical way the form and content of reality). In short, information instructs us, this assumption says, about the nature of the world we live in: its history, its future, its functioning, our place in it, our possible
actions, and the potential consequences of those actions.' p.35.

[My emphasis.]

Brenda Dervin. Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making: A Proposed Theory for Information Design (chapter 3) In R. Jacobson (Ed.), Information Design (pp. 35-57). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Previously: Information design: Tufte & Raskin 

Global health is ... c/o King & Koski (2020)

Use of the word 'global' in health care is common: from global assessment; global as in a pandemic, as per Covid which for a time closed down most human activity across the world; the global health workforce; and global health crises, that must include the climate crisis and pollution. Universal health coverage, allied with universal healthcare access, refers to (national and aspirational ...) global access to quality health services. 

Above, 'global health' has itself already occurred several times. I've posted about global health on a great many occasions on behalf of other parties.

Defining global health in the context of public health, King and Koski (2020) write:

'We propose the following definition:
global health is public health somewhere else.'

More specifically, they add: 

'Global health as a field is not distinguished by its aspirations, methods of research and practice, intervention strategies or even geographical area per se, but rather by a particular relationship between its practitioners and its recipients: a person engages in global health when they practise public health somewhere—a community, a political entity, a geographical space—that they do not call home.'

To apply Hodges' model to global health, there must be another definition.

King NB, Koski A. Defining global health as public health somewhere else. BMJ Global Health
2020;5:e002172. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002172

Lavoisier: Math - Chemistry; Quantity, Quality, Principle ...

The philosophy of science, can not avoid being viewed historically, which leads us to learn how mathematics literally took hold, from physics, to chemistry and biology. The application of mathematics to chemistry provides many and ongoing insights:

'Curiously enough, Kant’s own student, Jeremias Benjamin Richter (1762-1807), would only a few years later disprove his professor with his PhD dissertation On the use of the mathematical method in chemistry (Richter 1789). It laid the groundwork for stoichiometry as an algebraic approach to chemistry, including what was later called the ‘law of constant proportion’ that John Dalton used for his atomism on chemical grounds (Richter 1792-3, Dalton 1808). Moreover, at the time of Kant’s writing, experimental philosophy was taking over most of the centers of European research to become the mainstream methodology of modern science, which would later denounce the ideal of a priori knowledge in science as ‘mere’ metaphysics. Although some philosophers of mathematical physics still adhere to that ideal today, Kant was a late partisan in the struggle for the methodological priority of mathematics in the study of nature as it was exemplified by the old field of ‘rational mechanics’. Yet, his view on science became marginalized as much as his verdict on chemistry, that it would be alien to mathematics, was refuted.'

The pitfalls presented and Schummer's 2.4 A methodological suggestion for defining mathematical chemistry are helpful.

Joachim Schummer. Why Mathematical Chemistry Cannot Copy Mathematical Physics and How to Avoid the Imminent Epistemological Pitfalls. HYLE--International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 18, No.1 (2012). pp. 71-89. https://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/18-1/schummer.htm

Maths is filled with tragedy, but the personal manifestation in my lack of ability, pales to insignificance to the many scientific and human tragedies history reveals. Consider Galois, and Lavoisier:

‘Only a moment to cut off that head and a hundred years may not give us another like it,’ lamented the 18th-century French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange. The head in question had belonged to the French aristocrat and chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who was executed at the hands of French revolutionaries on 8 May 1794. Lavoisier’s ideas changed the face of chemistry. He is best remembered for overthrowing the phlogiston theory, but perhaps his greater and more lasting achievement was to impose order on the language and symbolism that have shaped the thoughts of chemists.'

Paul Board, The Aristocrat who revolutionised chemistry, New Scientist. May 7, 1994 (Volume 142, Issue 1924). https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14219243-300/

In an essay in the Charles Coulston Gillispie's essay in the history of scientific ideas, Chapter VI. The Rationalization of Matter, describes how Lavoisier sought to develop an algebraic approach:

'But what is most interesting is Lavoisier's mode of representing these results, so correct in quantity, so wrong in principle. In order to sec what he was about, one has to follow him into some detail. It is obvious, he writes, that acidification of a metal involves many variables-heat, concentration, chemical affinities, etc. each of which is a force acting with characteristic energy. Therefrom results a problem complex and difficult of solution: [my emphasis]

"Better to exhibit the state of the question in this respect, and in order to show at a glance the result of what happens in metallic solutions, I have constructed formulas of a sort, which could at first be taken for algebraic formulas, but which have not the same object, and do not derive from the same principles . . ."'

Gillispie, Charles Coulston. The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960.

Gillispie quotes at length to demonstrate Lavoisier's approach*. There is a more accessible (for me, here) source in -

Stefano Zambelli (2012). Chemical Kinetics, an Historical Introduction, Chemical Kinetics, Dr Vivek Patel (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-51-0132-1, InTech, Available from: 
http://www.intechopen.com/books/chemicalkinetics/chemical-kinetics-an-historical-introduction

Please see page 6: 3. Chemical equilibrium conception: The law of mass action.

To close, there is reading and advice to be carried forward in:

Guillermo Restrepo & José L. Villaveces, "Mathematical Thinking in Chemistry". Special Issue: Chemistry and Mathematics, Part 1. HYLE--International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 18, No.1 (2012). pp. 3-22. https://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/18-1/restrepo-villaveces.htm

Gillispie concludes his illustrated exploration of Lavoisier:

'Is this not the most tantalizing memoir in the history of chemistry, and in Lavoisier's the most appealing? Here alone, one gets a sense of modesty. He never claims for these expressions the dignity of algebra. "We are still very far from being able to introduce mathematical precision into chemistry, and I beg, therefore, that no one consider these formulas . . . as more than simple annotations, of which the object is to ease the labors of the mind." (But compare this disclaimer with what he says of algebra itself in the Method of Chemical Nomenclature: "Algebra is the analytical method par excellence: it was invented to facilitate the labors of the mind, to compress into a few lines what would take pages to discuss, and to lead, finally, in a more convenient prompt and certain manner to the solution of very complicated questions.")' p.245.

*in - Lavoisier, A.L. (1782). Considerations sur la dissolution des metaux dans les acides, Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences 1782, pp. 492-527, Available from http://www.lavoisier.cnrs.fr/ice/ice_book_detail-fr-text-lavosier-Lavoisier-49- 5.htm

Children: FACE the past, future, your social media, Capitalism

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MENTAL HEALTH and WELLBEING LIFELONG LEARNING   KEY LITERACIES  PSHE EDUCATION -  Personal, Social,  Health and Economic

The Face

'Apps such as TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of young girls and teenagers advising their peers on elaborate skincare routines, especially through a popular line of content called "Get Ready with Me". Parents have sounded the alarm over this trend, while recent medical literature has recognised the phenomenon of "cosmeticorexia", also called "dermorexia", defined as a culturally reinforced preoccupation or obsession with achieving "flawless" skin that can lead to "excessive, age-inappropriate or compulsive use of cosmetic products".'

'Italy is investigating a beauty retailer and make-up brand owned by French luxury group LVMH over claims their marketing has fuelled "cosmeticorexia", an unhealthy obsession with skincare among young girls. The Italian Competition and Market Authority (AGCM) said yesterday it was probing Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics for suspected "unfair commercial practices" with the promotion of skincare products such as face masks, serums and anti-ageing creams to girls as young as 10 years old. Those marketing campaigns were carried out mainly via social media, the  regulator said, leading young girls to "compulsively" buy such products.'

My sources: Amy Kazmin, LVMH's Sephora probed in Italy over fuelling young girls' skincare obsession, FTWeekend, 28-29 March 2026, p.1. FTWeekend and The Times. Reviews.

London visit February. Waterstones, Foyles, Hatchards & others.

Book image: https://www.amazon.ca/Face-Cultural-Fay-Bound-Alberti/dp/1538766531
 

Previously: 'health' : 'face' : 'child' : 'obsession' : 'social media'