Health Informatics Journal

This article is intended to stimulate debate. It centres on the past and present relationship women have with scientific knowledge and technology and how this relationship, coupled with the division of labour, might result in female radiographers losing out to their male colleagues in the career race within the new National Health Service.

In 1992, the National Health Service (NHS) Executive launched the Strategy for Information Management and Technology (IM&T) in the NHS. This strategy was designed to enable all parts of the NHS to provide better care and communications through the appropriate use of IM&T.

Surgical information systems (SIS) do not act directly upon patients. Consequently, awareness of computer safety aspects may not be particularly high. Because surgery often involves life-critical and expensive procedures, the consequences of SIS failure on individual patients or patients en masse could be severe, dramatic and costly.

This paper outlines a project that explored the feasibility, development and implementation of interactive multi-media (IMM) in a health care education setting. The project took place at Manchester College of Midwifery & Nursing over a 12-month period from September 1994- 1995. It sought to resolve a resource-driven problem that existed in a pre- registration nurse training programme relating to the teaching and facilitation of community care.

A multi-media computer assisted learning programme has been developed to instruct medical students, junior hospital doctors, nurses and other health professionals the principles of the interpretation of the chest radiograph. The software offers a highly interactive system that allows self-education and assessment.