'Safe space' - which one?

 Individual
  |

     INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

psychological safety

physical safety

social safety

"NHS staff will be able to speak out about mistakes without fear of reprisal for the first time, thanks to a new investigation unit with "safe space" powers. The Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB), which was launched last week, has been granted a remit that in effect means any testimony or evidence given to it by doctors, nurses and other staff medical staff will not be handed over to another agency - such as the police, a coroner or the General Medical Council - unless the High Court rules that it must."

Lintern, S. 'Safe space' unit to protect NHS staff reporting medical errors, The Sunday Times, 22nd October 2023, p.11.

NHS data breaches: the 'cogeography' of who and where?

Computing this past week featured an item (extract below with link) -

Five more NHS trusts involved in serious data breaches
Written by Tom Young
Computing, 17 Jul 2009

Privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found five more NHS organisations in breach of the Data Protection Act.
The Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust reported the loss of an unencrypted CD initially thought to contain medical treatment details of 20,000 patients from the hospital’s cardiology department.
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Foundation Trust reported the theft of an unencrypted memory stick containing 143 patient details including sensitive medical information.
And Epsom and St Helier University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has been storing hospital records insecurely for nearly two years following data being transferred between hospitals. ...

Straight away reading this I thought of my previous post about cogeography and commented accordingly (which registered twice - oops!). In light of the previous post here's that comment with some additions....
Such events merely (without trivializing) highlight the human capacity to ERR big(gish) time. Is it not possible for tech to help? If info systems through to mobile devices had a sense of where they are and their status as carrying sensitive data recognised through digital IDs - plus additional meta-dynamic data, then 'cogeographic awareness' might result?

I blogged about this with ref to conceptual spaces.

This would be an artificial example and would make it possible for data previously designated as confidential, sensitive, - HOT data if you will - to self-destruct, 'e-vaporate' if it found itself beyond a given combined virtual or physical environment be that hospital, Trust boundary, SHA, or National border...? This capability already exists no doubt in the security services (although sometimes you wonder) or as suggested in the realms of 'MI' and '007'.

Cogeographic or (cogneographic) may be a neologism and seeks to conjoin the cognitive (cognition) involved in defining, representing and using concepts in conceptual spaces; AND the finding that knowledge is invariably situated - that is knowledge has a geography.

Copies of NHS and social care
data could - should - MUST
have a geography too...?

Another comment rightly questioned the ability to put personal data on
CDs and other media in the first place. Amid the emergence
of renewed debate about the future of e-health
records, clinicians may have a professional
duty to demand cogeographic
properties no
less ...?

Image source: http://www.tapintoquality.com/facts/glossary-d.html

Happy Anniversary 20th July!

Hodges' model: a tool for progressive disclosure

[Warning! This post extends (plays havoc with) the meaning of progressive disclosure.]

Trying to get on the surf board of the latest web-programming kind is proving to be very difficult. For many years now and as acknowledged on W2tQ the four links pages - one per care domain - have become a monster in motion. As the user scrolls down the links pages the sense of info overload becomes overwhelming. That is assuming they do scroll. There is no prompt apart from the right-hand scroll bar suggesting 'more'. Even though the links are only sitting in html tables, the experience is not exactly an exemplar of user interface design. It is poor on other counts too:

• The arrangement of the rows and categories are mine.
• Yes, reveal the holistic bandwidth of the care knowledge domains, but whatever happened to Socratic dialogue, discovery and subtlety? The user should be able to have a dialogue with the system - with Hodges' model. The holistic aspects should be revealed gradually, an act of discovery not a slap straight in the face.

Several of the books and magazines I've been reading over the years and more recently speak of the user interface design technique of progressive disclosure. Hodges' model is progressive disclosure incarnate in several respects:

• The model is revealed to the student progressively as the student learns (this means of course that Hodges' model remains forever dynamic).
• A further level of unfolding occurs in curriculum development terms. As the curriculum is revealed and subjected to review and development. In this way the model is constantly pruned, grafting may take place - such is the model's need to be progressive (and academe's need to ensure the model is fit for purpose).
• As the previous post hinted progressive disclosure is a baton. So, who do you want to pass it to? Remember the model is neutral. It does not prescribe. Is the patient free to progressively disclose, or is the process directed by the health or social care agent? Perhaps, things are driven by a bureaucracy, which must in turn provide its own progressive disclosure c/o freedom of information legislation?

There are other priorities, but looking at the links pages I'm wondering if I can finally through jQuery display just the categories and then have the user toggle the actual links display on and off. Having the user reorganise the listing would be cool. Then they would really become a part of the progressive disclosure, but it may be better to just toggle before I drag and drop.