I am a hospital medic - a consultant paediatrician - working in a teaching hospital in South London, UK. I am on the acute/emergency rota but, most of the time, look after children and young people with eating disorders, diabetes, obesity and hormone/endocrine problems. I am fascinated by the time of life that is being a young person, emerging into adulthood. From a medical services perspective, young people in adolescence often get a raw deal and I want to change that.
I am married to the amazing Dr Serena Haywood and live in South London. We have teenage boys and a retired greyhound, Dusty Sampson Rocket. We rescue chickens too. I used to encourage our boys to eat their vegetables a lot when they were littler, and so the name stuck.
And I love tech, all things code, and in particular practical simple technology ideas that change and improve lives. The connectivity that mobile devices have given us all open possibities that most people in healthcare haven't begun to explore.
The project I am proudest of is the most recent - check out the RCPCH growth charts API. This is the first time a medical royal college (the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) has undertaken to host its own code. Coding a growth chart involves an amazing nerdy mix of interest in childhood growth, stats, charting and data visualisation. The team putting the API together are amazing and I am very privileged to be learning from some of the big names in UK Children's Growth Chart development.
The npm module was my first attempt at the growth chart algorithm, and is written in JS (obvs). I worked on the same thing in SqlServer with Chief Clinical Information Office, Dr Jack Barker and this has been live at King's College Hospital on our electronic health record for over 10 years.
Another project I am loving is a deep dive into Django 4 with [RCPCH Epilepsy12](https://github.com/rcpch. Epilepsy12 is a national audit of the care all children and young people with epilepsy receive in the UK. it comprises a postgres database and front end, with a DRF API. Building the application has gone hand in hand with a review of the audit itself. This is the second partnership I have had with @marcusbaw working with the amazing RCPCH.
Another area I have worked in for several years is child and adolescent eating disorders. The assessment of malnutrition of young people with restrictive eating disorders like anorexia nervosa can be difficult and I now lead (jointly with Dr Lee Hudson) a group of clinicians called MaRSiPAN who seek to set the national standards for this assessment. As part of this, the measurement of BMI in children and its interpretation can be done using the MaRSiPAN app - this exists in android and iOS. I am currently working on a new iteration which I am developing for the first time in Flutter, now that MaRSiPAN has been relaunched by the Royal College of Psychiatrists as MEED (Managing Emergencies in Eating Disorders).
Other projects dabble in and around adolescent health or medical training. There are projects in python, javascript/typescript, react, meteor, ionic, android and ios.
If you have an questions on my projects, or you are keen to collaborate please raise issues and send pull requests. Or I can be found most days @eatyourpeas / eatyour_peas or....
