So, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I worked in the NHS. No names of the hospital required, suffice to say it’s a fairly well known University teaching one. I worked in the Renal unit – which is where they treat people with diseases and problems related to their Kidney function, and also perform Kidney transplants. First off, i’d like to say this is probably one of the best and most enjoyable jobs i’ve ever had. Why you may ask? Simply because most of the people were fantastic (not all, but most), and they genuinely wanted to help people get well again and improve their quality of life. So hat’s off to those people for doing so. For the record, I am not medically qualified. So I don’t hold degrees in Medicine or Surgery (i’d like to, but not had the chance yet); I have a degree and post graduate degree in computer science, and some general science qualifications (physics, maths, human nutrition, biology etc). So, it was my job to help all the medical staff run their IT systems. This included all their equipment (hardware), devices, printers, file servers etc, and of course, most importantly their patient systems, which are essentially front end applications with databases behind, including (as you would expect) all kinds of demographic, medical data, biochemistry results, and tissues types and so forth. As you can imagine, these systems were very important, as without the data, the medical staff could not use the information, such as biochemistry results etc to actually interpret and treat the patients. For someone relatively young at the time, this was a fairly big responsibility, but one I throughly enjoyed. Even more of a surprise came when I realised that consultant level doctors and surgeons were actually relying on me to help them! This is quite unusual, as of course, these individuals are for the most part extremely talented and well qualified in their field and are usually in the expert position (with the patient etc), however, in this case, when it came to anything to do with computers, that was me (I was the expert! lol, yes I am of course taking the p**s, as I know a little, but the word ‘expert’ is well… not needed really). Anyhow, the point of this is that whenever new functionality, or a new database was needed, I had to extract the information and perform the analysis, through interviewing the consultants (i.e. the medical experts) and then create them a front end and database to provide them with what was needed. For example, a tumours database…I listened intensely to the consultant who was providing me the information of the database requirements and I was busily taking notes down. The consultant was explaining, how he needed the database linked to the renal transplant database. Then as a non medical person, I was thinking to myself, why on earth would you needed a tumours database linked to the renal database? So I asked the question of course, as it seemed to most logical thing to do to resolve my curiosity. The consultant calmly answered, “Well, unfortunately, a lot of patients go on to develop tumours after their transplant operations…”. I was flabbergasted, and didn’t immediately know why this was the case. So asked the follow up question as to the reason. The answer came back from the consultant…”well, after a kidney is grafted (transplanted), the person’s body will try to reject the organ. They needed to take immunosupressive drugs to stop the organ being rejected (i.e. destroyed); the reason they then develop tumours, is because their immune system capability is reduced, therefore, cancerous cells are no longer dealt with as effectively (i.e. destroyed by the immune system), and they can develop into tumours!”. I was astonished by that and it really left me deep in thought. So that concludes the first post on this topic and enlightenment (for me). More to follow soon on the immune system and subsequent thoughts.
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