A method to find the most recent activity for a patient.

Producing a listing of activity sounds simple. But the way you format the listing makes the difference between a happy customer and an unhappy one.

Ways to summarise clinical coding information at episode level.

Searching for episodes coded with a particular diagnosis or procedure code is a bread-and-butter task for NHS information analysts.

A pattern for creating sustainable routine reports in Excel.

Many organisations have evolved processes that require colleagues to email information to one another, or receive information by email from another organisation. In this case, you may want to automatically perform actions such as saving an email and its attachments to a folder when received if it meets certain criteria. Microsoft Outlook is ubiquituous in NHS organisations, and it is possible to automate Outlook processes using VBA.

Like most people, I’m quick to turn to Google when I need to know something, and Google searches for SQL-related questions throw up plenty of results from sites like StackOverflow. However, many companies produce database software, and many of these products are queried using a language called “SQL”. But it turns out that each product has its own dialect. Keywords that work in one product may not work in another - and so the answer you find may not work in your database.