Welcome to what we hope will be an exciting, fun and fulfilling project. We are looking forward to working with you in the next few months, looking at innovative solutions in healthcare IT. This work has the potential to significantly improve people’s lives, but working in this space comes with a few quirks and restrictions.

Therefore we have put together this short document/checklist to get you ready for this exciting challenge. This will help you negotiate some of the legal and ethical issues around working with healthcare data, and will get you some extra training that will look good on your portfolio. Within the first few weeks, we recommend that you undertake the following.

By the end of the first week

Confidentiality

  • Complete 2 short online MRC courses regarding the legal use of healthcare data and confidentiality (need to register to access it but it is free).
  • Good Research Practice (developed by MRC Head Office)
  • Research Data and Confidentiality
  • They are designed for people who are doing medical research with patient data, but the issues covered are the important ones.
  • When you have completed the courses please download the certificate and send them to me. We need to keep a record of this.

Git and Gitlab

  • Learn all about Git as a tool. You may start with GitHub (rather than GitLab) online tutorials as the two are very similar.
  • Sign up for a GitLab account
  • We will be using this to store all our code. This allows for collaboration, versioning and also permits continuous integration of code.
  • Do not just store all your code locally on your machine!
  • Please send us your GitLab ID so that we can add you to the relevant group.

Communication

  • Make sure you have joined the Termlex Slack Team at https://termlex.slack.com
  • You can also download Slack native apps for your devices for easy communication.
  • Once on Slack, you will join the channel created for your team or project.
  • We suggest using Slack for quicker response and using Emails for longer discussion.

In the first few weeks

  • Read the handovers from the teams who were previously working on your projects (unless the projects are new). The documentation will be essential to understanding what has been done previously, before you build on their work.
  • If you are feeling adventurous, have a look through their code too and see if you can follow it.
  • Don’t feel ashamed to ask any questions you have, of the CS supervisors, the clients, the mentors and other students. This will improve your understanding and also help to build collaboration between students.

Remember that you are working in a team

  • We will be choosing some core architectures that will be common across projects, in order to reduce complexity of maintaining the projects. Some may be new to you, but hopefully they will be fun to learn!
  • When working on your projects, remember that any changes you make in your components can affect other people’s work. “Continuous integration” (CI) and “continuous deployment” (CD) strategies will help to reduce any clashes. Learn about these strategies and implement them early. GitLab helps you easily set this up on your code repository using gitlab-ci
  • There may sometimes be conflicts between members in a team. Please remember to be civil to each other and try to resolve your differences. If you are still having difficulties, please let your supervisor know.
  • Please ensure that you maintain good communication with your teammates and your clients. This should reflect how you would behave in any job you undertake in the future. Poor communication or disengagement will be frowned upon.

We look forward to working with you in the next few months. I am sure it will be a fun and rewarding experience.

What next?

We recommend you browse our learning portal next.

This induction page is based on content originally created by Dr Navin Ramachandran of UCL Hospitals. We would like to thank him for allowing his work to be shared on this site.