2024 Conference Round-Up
By Stephen Hibbs, Nina Fudge, Deborah Swinglehurst, and Duncan Reynolds
Stephen, Nina, Deborah, and Duncan write about the range of conferences they presented at this summer.
British Society of Haematology Annual Scientific Meeting in Liverpool
In April, at the 64th British Society of Haematology Annual Scientific Meeting in Liverpool, Stephen Hibbs and Professor Omolade Awodu, President of the Nigerian Society of Haematology and Blood Transfusion (NSHBT), gave a joint presentation on the NSHBT-HaemSTAR Fellowship for Collaborative Research. Along with other members of the fellowship steering group, they have established a fellowship for two early-career haematologists from Nigeria, offering personal mentorship, project supervision, and funding for two in-person visits to the UK. Drs. Aisha Umar and Michael Egolum have been selected as the first Fellows . The presentation highlighted the fellowship’s progress and the insights gained from the collaborative efforts of the steering group.
In August, Stephen will co-present a talk virtually at the NSHBT conference in Ibadan, Nigeria. The two Fellows have already made significant strides and will be launching the network with two national projects during this meeting. Stephen has found the project both educational and enjoyable. The senior members of the steering group, such as Professor Awodu in Nigeria and Professor Imelda Bates in Liverpool, have demonstrated remarkable humility and a willingness to learn from junior members. The group has embraced the learning process with a sense of humour and camaraderie. They are excited to see the Fellows advance this initiative and hope it will inspire future collaborative research within Nigeria and between Nigeria and the UK.
Sustainable Primary Care Bristol
Sustainable Primary Care was the theme for this year’s Society for Academic Primary Care conference held in Bristol. Deborah and Nina, joined by expert by experience Malcolm, presented research and creative outputs about polypharmacy and overprescribing. A keynote given by Prof David Puncheon (founder of the Sustainable Development Unit for NHS England) and Dr Tasmin Ellis (GP and director of Greener Practice) highlighted the impact of prescribing on the NHS’s carbon footprint and how sustainable practices within primary care have benefits for current and future patients beyond simply reducing the carbon footprint. 4% of England’s carbon emissions are produced by the NHS. The biggest contributor to carbon emissions within the NHS in England is medicines (20%).
First up, Deborha, Nina and Malcolm ran a workshop for 20 participants based on the fictional stories ‘Let’s talk differently about medicines’. This collection of short stories aims to inspire new avenues for discussion between clinicians and patients about their medicines and care. Workshop participants read the stories and then reflected on the value of the resource, discussed the issues raised by the stories, and generated ideas about how to use the resource within primary care.
Deborah Swinglehurst introduced the Creative Enquiry to the SAPC conference as Scientific Chair in 2018. Creative Enquiry encourages researchers to use creative media and the arts (e.g. poems, stories, photography, painting) coupled with reflective writing to explore the interface between lived experience and medicine. Creative Enquiry is increasingly used in medical training to develop reflective practice so that future doctors can enlarge human understanding, critically reflecting on their own practice and the clinical encounter. This year, Deborah, Malcom and Nina performed a reading of Polluting the Planet – one of the fictional stories focused on the environmental impact of polypharmacy
Rounding off an active conference, Deborah presented a recently published paper on misunderstandings and existential concerns within the medication review and Nina introduced a policy analysis of Structured Medication Reviews to address polypharmacy.
Oxford Global Bioethics
Duncan Reynolds attended the Oxford Global Bioethics Conference in July. The 2024 conference focused on critical ethical issues in global health policy, practice and research that are most in need of sustained and substantial attention from researchers, funders and policy makers.
Duncan presented his work “Awaking from the “moral anaesthetic” of quantification: An ethnographic study of the creation of Artificial Intelligence for general practice”. Duncan argued that certain processes, such as bureaucratic, technical, and algorithmic, can obscure the moral aspects of decision making, a phenomenon known as “quantification as a moral anaesthetic”. From here, he traced the notion of quantification as a moral anaesthetic through an ethnographic study of an interdisciplinary team creating an AI intervention to improve the lives of people with multiple long-term conditions. He showed how prevalence thresholds were used in the initial phases to decide which diseases to include and exclude in the dataset to train and validate the algorithm. Over time the use of these cut offs was moved away from over concerns that employing them would exacerbate existing social, gendered, and racial inequalities in healthcare. To try to minimise these problems, ethical decisions over inclusion and exclusion were made through consensus panels.
EASST
Just a couple of weeks after the Oxford Global Bioethics conference, Duncan attended the EASST conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He presented in the sub theme “Sociotechnical dimensions of explainable and transparent artificial intelligence (AI). This panel examined explainability and transparency as key mechanisms allowing the opening up of normative processes, practices and data within AI and machine learning techniques. It will discuss the consequences of current approaches to explainable AI and transparency from a Science and Technology Perspective.
Duncan presented his paper “Negotiating Explainability in the Development of Sociotechnical Intelligence: An ethnographic study of the creation of AI for healthcare”. This showed how attempts to make AI explainable can often be as opaque as the systems they are attempting to make transparent. Through ethnographic observations this presented showed how project members started to explore making their work explainable after interaction with the patient group associated with the project, who had said it was a priority. From here, it was thought that a technical solution could be found to the problem through the application of an explainability tool called SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). However, in subsequent interdisciplinary meetings involving data scientists and clinicians, the results of the SHAP analysis underwent extensive debate and interpretations to bridge the gap between technical explanations and clinical relevance. Here, many of the results’ validity were questioned by the clinicians as they interpreted them as proxies for other features such as age. The results highlight the opacity inherent not only in AI, but also the technical solutions employed create transparency.
