We are setting up this invitation-only meeting to explore interest in a regular meeting / network on health scares. In this initial meeting we will have brief presentations covering a range of topics in the context of health-scares, including: 

• The role of traditional and social media
• Symptom reporting, nocebo effects and mass psychogenic illness
• Changes in help-seeking behaviour, and in clinician- and policy-maker behaviour
• The role of mistrust and conspiracy theory

In the first part of the day we will cover a broad range of areas, with speakers from psychology, anthropology and public health discussing their work in the context of terrorism, vaccination, wind farms and more. In the second part, we will explore possibilities of organising a more regular meeting. 

Please note that due to space restrictions, this meeting is invitation only.

Attendees will need to arrange and pay for their own travel and accommodation.

About ADOS-2
The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule - Second Edition (ADOS-2) is a semi-structured assessment of communication, social interaction, and play/imagination for individuals suspected of having autism or other pervasive developmental disorders.

Outline
The online ADOS-2 training course consists of five modules; each of which is appropriate for children and adults of differing developmental and language levels, ranging from nonverbal to verbally-fluent.

Who Can Attend?
This comprehensive online course, which is suitable for clinicians and researchers with experience in autism spectrum disorders, will cover training in administration and coding of all five modules.

Course Trainer: Emma Woodhouse.

Dates: Monday 28^th February to Thursday 3^rd March 2022. This is a 4-day online course, running from 9.15am – 4.30pm each day.

About ADI-R
The Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) is considered to be one of the ‘gold standard’ clinical diagnostic instruments for assessing autism in children and adults, this structured interview helps researchers and clinicians diagnose autism and plan treatments.

Outline
This comprehensive online course focuses on behaviour in three main areas: qualities of reciprocal social interaction; communication and language; and restricted and repetitive, stereotyped interests and behaviours.

Who Can Attend?
This 3-day online training course is suitable for researchers and clinicians working with children and adults, and who have existing experience with autism spectrum disorders

Course Trainer:  Emma Woodhouse.

Dates: Wednesday 16^th - Friday 18^th March 2022.  This is a 3-day online training course running from 9.15 – 4.30 each day.

The mental health of veterans is a topic frequently discussed in parliament and in the media. However, such discussions are often based on anecdotal, rather than robust research-based, evidence.

Following on from highly successful previous years, this one-day conference will again be hosted by the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR). The conference will bring together speakers from King’s College London and leading UK and international institutions to explore and discuss the mental health of the Armed Forces Community.

The Standard Fee is £99 and includes all refreshments, lunch, drinks, canapé reception, free WiFi and a certificate of attendance. 

There are two tickets available for each Cobseo member organisation at a reduced price - Please email veterans-conference@kcl.ac.uk for the password stating which Cobseo organisation you are a member of before making your booking.

COURSE AIM

The course provides a comprehensive introduction to trial design features used to mitigate bias, important aspects of trial design, conduct, analysis and reporting, and challenges and solutions for conducting RCTs with some focus on behavioural interventions. This will include some coverage of methods for elucidation of treatment mechanisms (e.g. mediation). Throughout the course the emphasis will be on practical issues faced by researchers in the conduct and analysis of RCTs through the lens of the mental health setting, and participants will be provided with skills to design, conduct and analyse rigorous RCTs in this research area.

REQUIREMENTS

This course requires an application to be made, please see more information tab on how to apply. Some practical sessions will involve analyses and interpretation using practice data sets using the Stata and/or R programs.  Stata and R syntax will be provided and explained, but some familiarity with software, especially Stata, is necessary, and individuals should have some knowledge of fitting regression models. Successful participants will need to bring their own laptop computer to the course with working installations of: 1) Stata version 14 or higher, 2) the R program.

Content Overview

Clinical prediction research develops models that try to predict the chances of a clinical outcome (such as death, diagnosis, treatment success or other future outcomes) based on characteristics related to the patient. Such models can be used to help clinician communicate the chances of clinical outcomes to their patients and to improve their management. It is therefore of crucial importance that such models are developed and tested appropriately. This 10-day course is aimed at PhD students and researchers in mental health and will provide an introduction to key components of prognosis and stratified medicine research using cutting edge statistical and machine learning modelling techniques.

The course covers all major steps of developing and accessing a clinical prediction model, including study design and data preparation, the problem of over-fitting in regression models, how to overcome over-fitting using penalized regression and cross-validation methods, how to deal with missing data, feature variable selection using random forests, and performance assessment and clinical usefulness of a model. Each day a short presentation of an application in prediction modelling will be presented. Teaching will be through lecturers and practical computer lab session interspersed with short presentations of prediction modelling researchers on current work. Practical sessions will involve the analyses and interpretation of practice datasets using the software R. Syntax of all procedures will be provided and explained but some familiarity with a syntax-based software (R, Stata, SAS) is advised. A short 2 h introduction to R will be provided at the beginning of the course.

Course Aim:

This module is an introduction into path analysis and structural equation modelling using the Stata software. The module features an introduction to the logic of SEM, including assumptions, model

specification, identification and estimation. Models for continuous and discrete response variables and continuous and discrete latent variables will be covered. Growth, autoregressive, MIMIC, and

instrumental variable models will be included.

Requirements:

This workshop will assume that participants have a good knowledge of:

• Basic regression and statistical modelling
• Writing code to run statistical models/syntax based statistical software, and familiarity with the Stata software specifically (such as can be obtained from the BHI Introduction to Stata course). Participants will need to provide their own laptop computer with Stata installed.

Course Aim:

The 10-day course provides an introduction to the nature of medical text, and the technical and organisational challenges encountered when processing.

The course will be based around practical examples and widely used NLP tools.

The course aims to provide an introduction to the major techniques of natural language processing, and to provide participants with the skills to create their own NLP applications, using both rules based and statistical approaches. Methods will be introduced for extracting structured information from text, and for automatically classifying text, together with the selection of data for training and for evaluation.

The course will discuss aspects of NLP that are specific to medical and biomedical texts, and develop a critical awareness of the issues associated with these texts. Participants will be equipped with the skills needed to analyse their own language processing problems, to design and test solutions, and to understand the limitations of those solutions.

The course will provide a practical instruction in the use of some widely used tools in NLP, including nltk (a Python toolkit).

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Starting from the scale construction and gradually moving to the most recent statistical methods employed in measurement, the course provides a complete methodological framework for applied researchers. While the classical test theory ideas on reliability and validity, often used in the literature, are presented, the more methodologically sound item response theory counterparts are explained (difficulty and discrimination, item and total characteristic and information curves).

For the measurement of the latent variable(s) the course presents exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (EFA and CFA) for numerical data. For categorical data, both the item response theory approach (IRT; 2-parameter logistic, grated response and partial credit models) as well as the item factor analysis model (IFA; both with regard to EFA and CFA). The course also presents the methods to explore measurement differences (measurement invariance) between groups (MG CFA), measurement differences due to covariates (MIMIC models), and measurement differences between raters or time points (longitudinal IFA), for all types of data.

Lectures and lab sessions will be based on the use of the Stata software.

Potential students should already be familiar with and have a good understanding of regression and factor analysis. While no prior knowledge of Stata will be assumed, this will not be a formal Stata course. The course will be of interest to statisticians, researchers and PhD students of Psychology and Psychiatry, and mental health professional who wish to acquire and/or consolidate the knowledge and skills necessary for mental health research.

This educational meeting is aimed primarily at clinicians who treat patients with diseases of the peripheral nervous system and muscle.  It aims to provide practical general clinical up-dates as well as an introduction to the science underlying neuromuscular diseases.  It should be of interest to general adult neurologists, clinical neurophysiologists, paediatric neurologists, clinical neuroscientists and allied health professionals, and suitable for both consultants and trainees.

Start time 09.00, finish 13.00. There will be seven lectures, each 25 minutes plus five minutes for questions, with two 15 minute breaks.

Programme available under the More Info tab.

The format will be an online video webinar.

Organisers: 

• Dr Rob Hadden, Consultant Neurologist
• Dr James Burge, Consultant Clinical Neurophysiologist
• Dr James Bashford, NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Neurology

THEME INFO

Theme:

Beyond trials: the rise of pragmatic approaches to implementation science in health and social care research 

Now in its fifth year, the 2022 conference will bring together online researchers, policymakers, clinicians, practitioners and service users from around the world.

Together we will share the best ways to implement evidence-based health and social care research within services and systems to improve health and care outcomes.

• Cognitive Remediation Therapy (CRT) for Anorexia

  Evidence from research suggests that part of the predisposition to and maintenance of anorexia nervosa (AN) lies in the neural template underlying emotional and information processing. 

   The typical neuropsychological profile seen in people with AN is marked by strengths as well as weaknesses. The strengths include superiority on tasks that require directed analytic effort.  However, relative weakness is found in tasks which involve flexibility/set shifting skills, which require the inhibition/unlearning of previous stimulus-response associations and a change to newly defined associations.

   The topics covered in the workshop include:

  • Hypothesis driven approach provides experimental evidence and allows the mapping of cognitive processes in AN
  • Research evidence bridged to specific strategies for treatment
  • Development of pre-treatment package for the inpatient programme encompasses a 10 session intervention comprising of cognitive exercises delivered in a motivational fashion
  • Results of a case series and randomized treatment trials using the aforementioned intervention

   Cognitive Remediation and Emotion Skills Training (CREST)

  CREST, a brief adjunct intervention, was developed for inpatients with Anorexia Nervosa (AN). We will share research evidence, clinical experience and evaluation of the work about the CREST.

 More information can be found under ‘More Info' tab.