Back in Baltimore for the last couple of days of my world tour of a few labs in North America. Looking forward to going home, to be honest, though it has been an amazing trip.
Yet another airport experience, but not as expected. Whereas flying Baltimore to Toronto felt like a domestic flight, the return trip involved entering all those tedious details such as destination address in the US, flight number, etc. etc. as part of check-in. And the queue at US Immigration (which happened in Toronto prior to boarding) had to be seen to be believed: it took at least an hour to get through it. What a good thing I'm a neurotic traveller who always allows at least two hours for check-in.
The plane was slightly larger than a domestic tumble-dryer, but not a lot. I somewhat resent the fact that I had to pay $25 to have my luggage stowed in the hold, whereas people with slightly smaller bags (who trundled them about 100m further than I did) had to pay $0 to have them stowed in exactly the same place. With 20:20 hindsight, I could probably have done this whole trip on a smaller suitcase and avoided all checked baggage fees, but when I left home I wanted to keep my options open. Climbing gear? Bring a minimum, just in case... Skirt and tights? Ditto... Hats, scarves, gloves? You can never have too many... The wisdom of hindsight is a wonderful thing.
On the flight I read a report on patient safety, which argued strongly that infection control is a much bigger issue than device design -- certainly in terms of cost-effectiveness of interventions. That is almost certainly true if one considers just hospital-based care in 2013. But home care in the future? We're all living longer; it will be essential to manage much more of our health outside the hospital setting; we're going to rely increasingly on medical devices for both monitoring and management... and they will need to be safe (as well as clean!). So hopefully our research has some long-term relevance.
Finally (for this evening): I love the defensive caution of the label on the condiments package that comes with the coffee machine in my hotel room. It apparently contains no nuts:
Yet another airport experience, but not as expected. Whereas flying Baltimore to Toronto felt like a domestic flight, the return trip involved entering all those tedious details such as destination address in the US, flight number, etc. etc. as part of check-in. And the queue at US Immigration (which happened in Toronto prior to boarding) had to be seen to be believed: it took at least an hour to get through it. What a good thing I'm a neurotic traveller who always allows at least two hours for check-in.
On the flight I read a report on patient safety, which argued strongly that infection control is a much bigger issue than device design -- certainly in terms of cost-effectiveness of interventions. That is almost certainly true if one considers just hospital-based care in 2013. But home care in the future? We're all living longer; it will be essential to manage much more of our health outside the hospital setting; we're going to rely increasingly on medical devices for both monitoring and management... and they will need to be safe (as well as clean!). So hopefully our research has some long-term relevance.
Finally (for this evening): I love the defensive caution of the label on the condiments package that comes with the coffee machine in my hotel room. It apparently contains no nuts:
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