Conventions used in this 'Care Facility'

... with apologies to the many book prefaces.

The following caregraphical (typographical) conventions are used in this care facility:

italic

Indicates new terms to the resident, patient, and family - often also described as jargon. These may include abbreviations, medical, nursing terms and words in fashion determined by academia and management. Some jargon may be twice removed from the resident, patient, and family since the medical and nursing staff cannot themselves fully apprehend the terms. These twice removed terms are frequently economic (such as 'commissioning' and 'funding').

Constant width

Used for care planning that is termed as being 'person-centered' and holistic. In print (the policy folder reality here) being constant and a standard width refers to care plans that are unadorned: a template format or proforma.

Constant width bold

Used for emphasis in care programming and declarative care <-> patient interfaces (interactions) such as "Sit down George!" Or whoever is trying to get up and walk about.

Constant width italics

Used by appropriately trained, person-centred and integrated teams and the idealistic (including exponents of 'holistic bandwidth') to show plans and care interactions that are client defined whenever possible and truly reflect high quality person-centered care.

Help for NHS.jobs and job hunters with standard file names

NHS.jobs is a marvellous web resource. Once you have entered your personal and career details you can save time and focus on what matters....

One thing I've noticed is that should you download assorted 'job descriptions', 'person specifications' and other essential guidance the files become meaningless when listed.

Browsers and operating systems do behave differently, but on my PC extra characters are appended to differentiate one 'jobdescription.doc (or pdf)' file from another.

There must be a way to define a standard across the NHS (and dare we suggest the social care sector)? Then prospective job-hunters can see from the file name the organisation, the job title, closing date or other combination of details? Given the redundancy in our language(s), the need for equality (in access) it would not take much to achieve this?

There are some points of note: what's the shelf (directory!) life of these files? "If you have not heard from us within four weeks of the closing date then please assume your application has been unsuccessful on this occasion."... Plus, the semantic web and an intelligent file system may overtake this problem and perceived requirement, but until then...?

Even if only gifted a recommended convention, then perhaps this could quickly emerge as a standard, because it makes a difference, affords an early advantage in the 'market place' and assists everyone.


As the demographic squeeze tightens its grip this might even help HR departments, students, returnees, and the middle-aged-mid-career-crises-smitten.

Until then NHS.jobs and job hunters can only handle the files they 'receive'.

NHS.jobs does very well in helping to open doors... in the meantime I'll keep knocking ... and anyway what date did I save that person spec?



Image source - previously at: http://www.ectomo.com

What are you - mathematician, book-reader or book-reading clock-watcher?

Sometimes you don't realise you are on a long-term cherry-picking escapade. I say escapade because this captures the rather haphazard, accidental and part-time nature of my fruit gathering.

In 1992 in the Engineering Computing Newsletter [SERC] Science and Engineering Research Council's EASE programme #38 p.4-5 Michael McCabe asked readers - "How would you label the quadrants of this diagram?"

I cannot find the brief article "Human Factors Aspects of User Interfaces Design" on the web, but I kept the original. It obviously meant something to me, McCabe shows why...

As a mathematician you might choose -

A clock-watcher -

- for a book-reader.

And a book-reading clockwatcher -

So, how would you label Hodges' model and does this say anything about how you would populate and read the model?