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Roughly a year after the documents were published, it is time to look back. That process may be gratifying (“Wow, I never thought that would fly”), inspiring (“better start getting on with that”) or horrifying (“who thought of promising that?”), but will almost certainly be tedious.
That is, if you hadn’t discovered word clouds. For those unfamiliar with the concept, these are a graphic representation of a document as a cloud of words, their size depending on how many times they feature. I have taken the visions, removed common words, and stuck them through wordle.net, which produces these things for free.
Yes, they may sacrifice some of the subtlety of the original documents. But then again they don’t include those pesky commitments – brilliant! – and allow a rapid, frivolous comparison of each strategic health authority.
Impressions jumping out at me included the fact that Ara Darzi’s A Framework for Action, published for London a year prior to the other visions, before he took on Parliamentary and ministerial duties, includes scant mention of “quality”. When and how, I wonder, did he settle on the buzzword?
Source: http://www.wordle.net
A year on – but still pre-High Quality Care for All – four regions had cottoned on to the Q word sufficiently for it to be visible in their clouds – namely the West Midlands, South West, North West and East of England.
In the North East’s cloud, “members” takes pride of place. Could this be related to its nearly-all-foundation trust acute sector prowess, I wondered? Sadly no, an investigation reveals it just lists all the “members” of its pathway groups. (Others: East Midlands,South Central,South East Coast, North East.)
So don’t read too much into them. In another experiment, though, I have translated health secretary Alan Johnson’s party conference speeches from 2007 and 2008. The sudden appearance of “Tories”, “Labour”, “years” and “government” is impossible to miss.
There are undoubtedly other webby tools and gizmos out there just waiting to be applied to the health world. Any recommendations, or examples of even more interesting word clouds, would be warmly welcomed.
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Readers' comments (3)
Anonymous | 27-May-2009 4:43 pm
You might try applying 'Fighting the Bull' from the Deloitte website.
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Anonymous | 28-May-2009 12:07 pm
Well it woud seem Deloitte have distanced themselves from that - I quote:
"Fightthebull.com is not affiliated with us. Any questions regarding Bullfighter should be directed to the fightthebull.com Web site."
www.deloitte.com/dtt/section_node/0,2332,sid%253D27374,00.html
The trouble with clouds is they don't always have a silver lining and are prone to precipitation. Alternative visual representations of such data are neat though. Connectedness and networks (paricularly in Social Networks) may seem fun but if they have a reasonable underlying algorithm can reveal interesting insights. Facebook has a reasonable one - can't give the URL from here as my current hospital filters and blocks SN sites but it made a good geographical map of my FB friends. "Well whats the use of that?" you might ask "They are your fiends right?" Yes, true, but I have never met some of them. "Well whats the use in that?" Well I use a simIIar network application on Biomedexperts when using and referencing published academic research. I certainly haven't met many of those people either but am happy to cite their work and by knowing how connected and cited they are can reveal other areas of research I might not have thought through. So a bit of visual automated lateral thinking if you like. It pretty much does what it says on the tin "Explore & expand your personal scientific network" http://www.biomedexperts.com/Portal.aspx
You will need a login and it reveals neat network diagrams according to connectedness through publication. A bit of a citation index on steroids!
I got interested in such technologies when trying to find 'expertise' in a large pharmaceutical I worked for (nowhere near as large as the NHS) and came across some work done at UofM at Amherst "Extracting social networks and contact information from email and the Web"
Aron Culotta, Ron Bekkerman, and Andrew McCallum. I have the PDF but not the exact reference so started a discussion on LinkedIn about 'Graphs of Connectedness' but it turned out to be a conversation with myself...you have to be a member of the LinkedIn club also to do that so pehaps blogging is a better way to ask those questions... I see SN technologies very much as a business tool and representation and visual analysis of a variety of relationships a key component of that... not altogether sure the clouds reveal much more than colourful word fequency counts at the end of the day TP
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Paul Tovey | 29-May-2009 1:18 pm
I can only add:
The NHS is full of word-"mistification" ....We all know that .
The truth is language in the NHS reflects the collision of resources on a dubiously staffed bus and the sorry accident of being a patient in the way . At the end of that process is the tangled spaghetti concept-wheels that go over you too
Alice 's ghost and Joseph Heller' spectre never laughed so much when they compared who had the best nonsense with the NHS snake and ladder beast ... And the Cheshire cat refused A& E treatment when he fell off the tree from laughing - in a howly mowl type way of course ..
And all this happened under the health skies and the fluffy puffy word clouds too
Who would have thought it Children of the State ?
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