First Friday

Happy Friday everyone! My weekend started 6 hours earlier. : )

I'm quite happy with how my first week has gone.  It's nice to have that the excitement and energy that comes with starting a new job or a new project.  I can see this project being a bit of a slog at times, so I'll do my best to maintain it.

I am conducting a structured review of literature on regional health inequalities.   Basically, I'm looking at a snapshot of all literature published in the last 2 years on health inequalities and then classifying based on what type of inequality is being studied.  The inequality could be by income, region, sex, occupation, age, ethnicity or some other measure.  I am then going to focus on those studies that have an inequality measured based on region, geography or urban/ rural divide instead of based on individual or household factors.  In these studies, I will look in-depth at how regional inequality has been measured, which health outcome is being studied and how the information has been presented.  The purpose of focusing on inequality by region is that region it is much easier to deliver an intervention at a regional level than to find all the individuals in a region living with low income, or of a particular ethnicity.

I wasn't very concise, but I hope that makes a bit of sense.  I'll also be helping out with some interactive data visualizations.  You can see some examples here.

Tomorrow morning, I am off on an early train to check out the capital city, Bern.  Then, in the evening, an Australia Day party with my Australian intern friends.  It should be a good weekend of exploring and relaxing a bit.