Peter Talbot

Welcome to my personal web site. If you would like to know about Pearbright Ltd, or contact me by e-mail, please go to www.pearbright.com

I rejoined the National Health Service in 2008 after a nine year absence. I'm using this web site to publish items which I hope will be of interest to NHS colleagues.

Bulk SMS or e-mail

There's a good deal of interest in using SMS messaging in healthcare - for example to remind patients about their appointments. This prompted me to produce some software for that purpose. The program will also send multiple e-mail messages.

The documentation has been updated to reflect the changeover to the MS-Exchange based NHS Mail service; if you have used an earlier version you will need to download the documentation and modify your configuration of stunnel.

Use the following links to download the software, the documentation and a test data file to illustrate what the system does. The software is provided as a zip file so in Internet Explorer use right-click and "save as" to save the zip archive file to your computer, right-click on the zip archive and choose "extract all", then run "setup".

Data Cleansing for Child Health

There have been a series of initiatives across London to improve the quality of data held on the Rio computer system for monitoring child health, with the primary objective of improving performance in child immunization take-up. Part of this exercise involves bringing the Rio database into line with GP lists. A very useful guide has been produced by Brent PCT with input from others.

These notes describe the exercise undertaken at Hounslow. We developed some simple software tools to perform data matching and manipulation as part of this exercise. This software can be made available to other NHS trusts if required.

Data Cleansing for Child Health

Batch Tracing the Rio Unknown GP report

This document describes the semi-automated production of a file for submission to the Demographics Batch Service for tracing. A technique is illustrated for converting an HTML page produced by the Rio system into a CSV file in the format expected by DBS.

I also describe a method of processing the file returned by DBS into a report which can be used by data entry clerks. This specifically addresses the problem whereby DBS returns only GP practice code, not GP code, whilst the RIO system does not support look-up of GP by practice code.

Batch Tracing the Rio Unknown GP report

Jayex Patient Call Displays

GP practices typically use an LED dot-matrix display in the waiting room, to indicate when the next patient can go in to see the doctor. The displays are supplied by Jayex, but it is often the responsibility of the PCT to maintain the cabling which connects these displays to the GP clinical computer system. These notes provide a technical description of the connection for use by technicians.

Jayex Patient Call Displays (PDF format)

Word Template - limiting the number of lines in a text box

Microsoft Word provides various features designed to enable form-filling, and these can be very useful in healthcare business processes. These features are an area in which I have to admit I had very little experience until recently. We were looking for a way to provide for multi-line text entry with a limit on the number of lines which could be entered - mainly to ensure that the user was prevented from entering information which would be hidden if the document was printed.

The solution I came up with is illustrated here: Example Word document