200 Years Since the Birth of Nursing Informatics?

It is 200 years since the birth of Florence Nightingale. This keynote paper reviews some of her work relating to health statistics and outlines its continuing legacy to nursing informatics around the world and especially in poorer countries, like South Africa, in the 21st century.

Nursing Informatics Beyond 2020; An Interactive Workshop Exploring Our Futures.

This interactive workshop will reflect on and update participants' views on possible future scenarios for the development of health and nursing informatics. The NI2006 Post Congress Conference discussed the future nature and scope of nursing informatics, nursing and healthcare, as viewed from likely developments between 2006 and 2020 [1]. Brief synposes from the NI2006 conference will be presented, with summaries of speakers' views on changes and progress since.

Health informatics education and capacity building in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.

Objectives: To describe the experience of, and lessons learned from, a collaborative project developing and delivering an MSc in Health Informatics in South Africa.

Methods: The description and discussion is based on the experiences of the staff delivering the course, and formal and informal evaluations, the former conducted as part of the University of Winchester's quality assurance processes.

Results: Some of the lessons learned from adapting the course to meet local needs are described and discussed.

Developing Online Communities with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - the IMIA OSNI and CHIRAD Experiences.

Many health informatics organisations do not seem to use, on a practical basis, for the benefit of their activities and interaction with their members, the very technologies that they often promote for use within healthcare environments. In particular, many organisations seem to be slow to take up the benefits of interactive web technologies. This paper presents an introduction to some of the many free/libre and open source (FLOSS) applications currently available and using the LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP architecture - as a way of cheaply deploying reliable, scalable, and secure web applications.