Yesterday afternoon I safely made a trip from London to Paris as part of a 10 day work trip. In London I was visiting Imperial College Healthcare NHS was hosted by Gerry Bolger. In Paris I will be attending and speaking at Doctors 2.0, as well as attending meetings to work on the Connecting Nurses initiative with the Sanofi team and virtually with some of our partners.

I was sad to leave London, since it was a fantastic trip! 

I got in on Thursday afternoon and had a quick visit with Alison Robb at the Mendeley head office. It was awesome to meet some of the great team behind the service, and hear about some of the exciting things coming. Then I got to catch up with Grant Harrison at a local watering hole about what the Future Well is up to, exciting things (Sherpaa), by the way.

The rest of the time in London I was graciously hosted by Gerry Bolger. Gerry is an excellent host and it was great to see and learn from the great nurses at Imperial. 

 

I'm going to follow up some of this trip in further detail, but suffice it to say the more I travel the more I realize we can learn and benefit from more international collaborative relationships. This is something Gerry and I talked about at length, and is one of the reasons we are both glad to be members of Sigma Theta Tau International, which is how we initially met and decided to arrange this trip. 

Now I'm on the second leg of my trip where I've got more work ahead. For now I'll be working from cafes and stopping by a few local hospitals. Then on Wednesday and Thursday Doctors 2.0 will start and I have a few meetings to go too. Already I've been to a few places in Paris and it is awesome to be back in a city with so much history. 

 

It is incredible to see some of the buildings that hospitals are in that we just do not get in North America. For example Hotel Dieu de Paris is the oldest hospital in the city. The photo below was taken there. As much as I think our hospitals in Toronto are great, they just do not make them like this anymore. 

 

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Of course I brought my camera, so here are the pictures I took of the evening. Below is a slideshow, but if you want any pictures you can go to flickr and download them there.

Would love to hear if you have ever been or if you took any pictures!

Today I found this video and it made my day.

This is awesome. It's a pretty good song for anyone not having a good day. Even better though a group of patients, families and providers made a fantastic video that can make anyone feel a bit better. Cancer sucks. It ruins so many things. This video is something beautiful that has emerged out of suffering and pain.

I wanted to share the video because it is an incredible example of what patients and providers should be doing every now and then with all the other hard work we put into trying to fix people and fight disease. Life. Sometimes we get caught up in what we are fighting or being challenged by and forget that we need to feel good about life, celebrate and maybe even dance a bit.

There are lots of tough things in life, but we don't always have to face them alone.

This is the type of video that makes me so happy to be a registered nurse. Happy Nursing Week.

SL1354_07 Nurse's Week Poster (2).pdf Download this file

As nursing week approaches I'm looking forward to going back to SRHC on Monday. I had a fantastic time there as a summer healthcare provider. This year I was honoured to be asked to come back to speak during nursing week. I'll get to go up there Monday morning. It will be great to be back and reconnect with some awesome people! 

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The Digital Conference where  you can meet all of HealthCare   THE Health 2.0 & Social Media Conference - not to be missed!     Why? - 75 speakers/KOLs from 25 countries (Europe, US/Canada & Asia)    - Concrete examples of Health 2.0, Mobile, Online Communities, Social Media etc. - Participation of all the HealthCare Actors - Incredible Plenary Session - 16 Parallel Sessions, Demos, Posters, Competitions... - Cocktail Soirée at the historic monument, Hotel Talleyrand - 23-24 May, Cité Universitaire Internationale campus Paris (75014)  The conference is under the patronage of the French Ministry of Health and is supported by Stanford Medicine X, LEEM (French Pharma Trade Union) and sponsored by: Novartis, Sandoz, Sanofi, Publicis Healthware, LexisNexis, Orange Healthcare, Doccheck, Take The Wind and Ideagoras. Last chance to sign up! Looking forward to seeing you there, Denise, Anne, Romain, Miles & Mathilde

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• Interrogate reality
• Provoke learning
• Tackle tough challenges
• Enrich relationships

I think people shy away from discussions about politics because these principles aren't followed. Instead we often want to hold onto self-interested, personal views, rather than being open to truth and further understanding of different perspectives.

Today while getting some things done I've been listening to Micheal Sandel's public debate "The Public Philosopher." Debating very interesting topics, and teasing out views of the audience. From debating issues of paying people to lose weight, which reminded me of Neil Seeman's book XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame.

If you haven't heard of Micheal Sandel, that is alright. You probably didn't attend Harvard, and you likely do not use iTunesU enough. He teaches one of the best lectures on the issue of Justice, which has incredible discussions in a room that fills over 1,000 students. I would highly recommend it. No matter what side of the issues you are on Sandel does an incredible job of helping people understand the philosophical issues behind complex issues fosters great discussion among students. I hope that these types of programs continue to help us have these critical conversations over dinner tables, in coffee shops and at local watering holes. To often we shy away from these conversations, which can lead to us ignoring the issues or only sharing our thoughts with those that can reinforce our own perspective.

[1] Scott, S. (2004). Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time (p. 320). Berkley Trade. Retrieved from

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Who is connected to you, by first or second degrees that cares about your health. Over the life time does this change and evolve?

For some reason I wanted to get away from text formats, which I find a bit limiting, so I tried making a Prezi, and embedded it below.

These are extremely rudimentary sketches, so please don't think this is based on some data or reproducible evidence. Even if we had data to help express these relationships every individual would have a varied experience.

Imagine we could apply individual cases to these models. Every individual would could have expansions and contractions of surrounding roles depending on any number of social and economic factors.

Beginning to diagram these images helps to illustrate the the complexity that we wish to simplify down to single points of data and easily digestible executive summaries.

Anyway, I did this to allow others to see what was on my mind. Who do you think cares most about your health? Am I way of in these diagrams? Feel free to let me know if you wanted to correct oversights or add to the dialogue. I simply wanted to share something I'd been thinking about a lot today.

At first it starts with simply turning off all distractions, picking on thing on your To Do list, and setting a time for 25 minutes that counts down your intense period of focus. Then rinse, lather and repeat, well actually you take a 5 minute break and then repeat it 3 more times before a longer break.

This method has been helpful when I'm not feeling productive and having trouble focusing. It also helps me manage my use of social media and other important, but potentially distracting/working avoiding tasks (like reading the newspaper or your favourite blogs).

The whole process is so simple, and that is the beauty of getting started with it. If you can use the basic process than you can move to high levels of the methodology. This includes breaking down projects into Pomodoros, keeping a log of your pomodoros, and then reviewing your productivity (time of day, location, etc.) to look for ways to improve it.

For a few years I've used the technique at the most basic level, because it seemed like to much work to everything else. I used a basic free App called Pomodoro Timer, but recently I found out they started offering a paid app, with some fun features. It turns your IM to a pomodoro focus message, so others will know why you aren't responding, which is just kind of neat. The best part is it marks the time you do it in your calendar and also collects the data about interruptions (whether I interrupted myself - sent text messages/turned on the tv) or if someone else interrupted me (received a call etc.).

I've only been using it for a few weeks now, but I really like it. I created a separate calendar for it. You can see in the picture above where it has put entries (I turned off my work/home/other calendars). When I have all my calendars on it gives me an interesting perspective of how I use my down time and space between meetings, social time and when on the road. This has been helpful.

Hopefully it helps me continue to see opportunities to use my time effectively.