The immensely useful CHAIN for healthcare professionals and allied folk is at risk - DHSC wants to defund. Boo, hiss.

If you work in UK health and social care (directly or indirectly - NHS, medical research, patient charities etc) you may well be subscribed to one or more sub-groups within 'CHAIN' (Contact, Help, Advice and Information Network). It's a curated set of thematic bulletins which sends out information about reports, events and job ads. Each theme (e.g. diabetes) has its own list of resources. You can email the central team and they'll share your information news to the relevant sub-groups. It's ridiculously useful. 

Yesterday I was quite surprised to get an email from CHAIN telling me that the Department for Health & Social Care, which funds it, wants to unfund it believing it to be of 'questionable utility'. Absolute scenes, as they say. I'm not sure what they're proposing to replace it with, or how setting up some new thing would save money, but I think interfering with something that's worked well for 29 years is a bad idea. 

There's no mention of this DHSC consultation on the DHSC consultations page.

Below is my emailed response, and some further info below that. Fingers crossed CHAIN is kept. If you want to write in please do so before 28 February 2026, to dhsc.publicenquiries@dhsc.gov.uk (and cc enquiries@chain-network.org.uk).

1. My email to DHSC

Dear DHSC, cc CHAIN

Please do not defund CHAIN. I had missed the news that it was at risk until today and am really quite surprised by the idea. I strongly disagree that it is of 'questionable utility' and wonder if it is simply less visible to you and that its use needs to be made more explicit. To that end, here's how I make use of it.

I find CHAIN incredibly useful and have shared material to and from it in several ways -
• I've shared work I've been doing with CHAIN colleagues and have recommended colleagues (previously at Diabetes UK and now at QMUL) do likewise
• I've shared info received from CHAIN with colleagues at Queen Mary, on the psci-com mailing list and beyond
• I regularly recommend that others (non-colleagues) who contact me about how best to distribute their information share it with CHAIN
• I learn about new reports, events and more generally just 'hear about things in and around various areas of interest' which is good for my own CPD

I have run psci-com, a large (4.5k subs) mailing list for science communicators (scicomm) / public engagement with science professionals (PES) since 2012, consequently people often get in touch to ask about distribution routes for events, resources and job ads. Whenever anything patient-engagement comes to the list I make sure the sender knows about CHAIN and sporadically add info to messages that go to the list, some examples below. I maintain a page of communities of practice for scicomm  / PES and healthcomm folk and CHAIN has been on that list since I created the page in 2021.

Last week I forwarded a CHAIN message about a PPI in Action webinar with a friend working in a similar area - (1) to tell them about the event and (2) to highlight that they might want to share their own future events with CHAIN. Friend was delighted to find out about the event as it's very relevant for them and colleagues.

Earlier in January I recommended that an email coming to the psci-com list was also shared with CHAIN: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?A2=PSCI-COM;27590bf3.2601

Here are a couple of other examples of me drawing the psci-com list's attention to CHAIN on an ad hoc basis -
February 2025: Patient & Public Involvement / Journal of Research Involvement and Engagement Fwd: CHAIN targeted message: a useful resource
May 2023: Oxford: Fwd: Job opportunity: Senior Programme Manager - Community Engagement in Global Health Research

Back in July 2025 I forwarded a CHAIN email about funding for Public Engagement in Health Data Research with faculty colleagues who produce a round-up of new funding for data projects, and highlighted CHAIN as a useful resource for them to keep an eye on.

I've been part of CHAIN since the mid 2000s after reading about it in Prof Trisha Greenhalgh's excellent book on critical appraisal 'How to read a paper'. At the time I was working as a Science Information Officer at Diabetes UK (a mix of science communication, public engagement, supporting patient in getting involved in research, and making sense of evidence) and signed up immediately. I now work at QMUL in the computer science department but often in projects allied to health, for example a large EPSRC project on the safety of medical devices, another on the use of Bayesian maths in medical decision-making tools and more generally on devices and tech for disabled people, and people with rheumatoid arthritis.

I think this important resource should be preserved and protected. A really useful feature is that emails are targeted to reach particular sub-groups. It's excellent and helpful. It is often the case that I suggest CHAIN to someone, and then a short while later receive a copy of the email that they've passed to CHAIN for distribution!

Thank you
Jo
Jo Brodie, Public Engagement Co-ordinator, QMEECS

 

2. Links for further information

1. Brief info on CHAIN: https://www.chain-network.org.uk/documents/brief_intro_to_CHAIN.pdf
2.Snapshot report: https://www.chain-network.org.uk/documents/Latest_analysis_of_CHAIN_membership.pdf
3. Compendium of feedback: https://www.chain-network.org.uk/documents/Compendium_of_recent_feedback.pdf
4. Recent messages delivered on behalf of CHAIN members and NIHR’: https://www.chain-network.org.uk/documents/examples_of_recent_messages_disseminated.pdf

I'm reposting the content of (1) below.

CHAIN (standing for Contacts, Help, Advice & Information Network), sponsored by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), is a successful online mutual support network for people working in health and social care.

The Network originated 29 years ago in the NHS Research & Development programme and has since grown into a not-for-profit international online community of about 15,000 people who are willing to share freely their knowledge and experience with each other. CHAIN is multi-professional and cross organisational, designed to connect health and social care practitioners, researchers, managers and educators.

Membership of CHAIN is free, and members may join the network, update their records or leave at any time.
Key benefits of CHAIN membership are:

• Access to a searchable online directory of all members and their interests
• The ability to post questions or seek advice from a rich and diverse pool of members
• Receiving intelligence on resources, activities, events and opportunities relevant to one's interests

There are more than 75 sub-groups and special interest groups within CHAIN, including long-established groups such as those focusing on Dementia, Diabetes, Stroke, Obesity, Patient & Public Involvement and more recent ones focusing on Social Care Research & Evaluation, Rural, Remote & Coastal Health & Social Care, Diagnostic technologies, Active or Aspiring Innovators, and AI in Health & Social Care.

For further information and to join CHAIN visit: www.chain-network.org.uk  

 

3. The CHAIN sub-groups

• Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR)
• Associate Principal Investigator Scheme sub-group
-- Associate PI Scheme Alumni
-- Associate PI Scheme PI Mentors & potential PI Mentors
-- Associate PI Scheme Study Teams
-- Associate PI Scheme Champion
• Autism
• Bereavement & Loss
• Better Care Without Delays
• Cancer Services and Support
-- Macmillan professional; Benefits & other financial help; Cancer care pathways; Cancer information & support; Cancer research; End of life care in cancer; Ethical & spiritual issues; Learning & development; Lymphoma; Outcome measures/audit in cancer; Out of hours care in cancer; Palliative care for cancer; Prescribing (medical and non-medical); Physical environments of cancer care; Primary care & cancer; Rehabilitation for cancer patients; Strategy development; Symptom/pain management in cancer; Survivorship & living with cancer; Treatment & CAM in cancer
• Care Homes & Residential Care
• Climate Change and Sustainability in health & social care
• Clinical Audit
• COVID-19 Rehabilitation
• Dementia
• Diabetes
• Domiciliary Care
• E-learning
• Equality and Diversity
-- BME health & social care
• Frailty
• Health & Well-being
-- Addressing Vaccine Scepticism and Hesitancy
• Obesity
• Cycling for Health & Wellbeing
• Health & Wellbeing of Health and Social Care Workers
• Health Care Ethics
• Health Economics
• Health & Social Care of Homeless People
• Human resources, organisational development and workforce planning, education & training of health & social care workforce
• Improving Patients' Experience
• Integrated health & social care
• Leadership
• Long COVID
• Mentoring & Coaching
• Multi-morbidity
• NIHR AHP WRaP
• Networks & Networking
• Nurses, Midwives and AHPs in Clinical Academic Research
• Open Research
• Parkinson's Disease
• Patient and Public Involvement;
• Patient Safety
• Poverty and health
• Prison & Forensic Health
• Published Researchers
• Quality Improvement
-- Healthcare associated infection; Clinical Microsystems; Lean Thinking; Health Analysts
• Research Ethics
• Research Governance
• Research into COVID-19
• Rural, Remote & Coastal Health & Social Care
• Self management of long-term conditions
• Service improvement
-- Service improvement among allied health professionals)
• Social Care Research & Evaluation
• Stroke
• Substance misuse and addictions
-- Special interest groups: Drug/Illicit Substance misuse; Tobacco addiction/smoking; Alcohol; Non-illicit substance misuse; Non-substance related addictive behaviours
• Technologies
-- Active or aspiring innovators
-- A.I. in health & social care
-- Diagnostic technologies
-- Regenerative Medicine
-- Telecare, telemedicine, teleconsulting
-- Bio-technical and adaptive Devices
-- The use of social media
-- Applied Information Technology
-- Digital Education Research
-- Futures in health & social care
-- Immersive Technologies
• Workplace Based Learning

 

 

 

Google Forms - can I customise the notification email alerts? Help needed

SOLVED hooray.

Here's how I solved it, below is the original problem.

I used a Google Forms add-on Email notifications for forms, which has worked beautifully - info and instructions here, and in brief below. To do this with ease I needed to revert to the old* style of Forms, to do this click on the ? mark at the bottom right of the form and choose the 'Back to the old Forms' option.

• Install the add-on from the add-on page itself (click 'Free', top right), a blank new form will appear which you can ignore and then a pop-up will appear asking you to confirm that it can interact with your account, I said 'yes'.
• Once it's added you'll have a new field in your Add-ons menu, on old forms it looks like this

On new forms it looks like this, but when I clicked on it there was no sign of the already added add-on, instead it offered me a range of add-ons I could search, hence my disenthusiasm for new forms.

• Click on it and go through the steps, I left it mostly at the default settings. If you have several forms make sure you give each one a different name so that you can manage the emails when they arrive.

Resulting emailed notification looks like this

*I find the new version very fiddly and unintuitive and spend too much time clicking on all the buttons and options to find the hidden item I want that's explicitly already on the page on 'old' forms. Who needs it.

---

My original question, now solved.

I have several work-related Google Forms which invite teachers to sign up for various things. Each time a teacher fills in a form their data is automatically stored in a Google Sheet and I get an email telling me that there's a new entry. Someone else set these up and I inherited them when they left.

Up until a few months ago these notification alert emails were useful and informative (image one), but now they look more like the second image, and are useless.

The old style of email notification, with actually useful information in it

The considerably less useful type of email alert I get now

It turns out that it's not possible to set up a notification from the forms only from the sheet - this may be something to do with the 'new' Google Forms as opposed to the old 'Legacy' version. I have been surprised to read various helpfiles telling me that it can't be done when, for months, I've been receiving them - but they mysteriously stopped in November 2016 and I've been trying to work out how to get them back. Now that I've got them I'm not awfully impressed.

I've tried adding 'add-ons' but have got nowhere with them. Is there a simple way of fixing this? I can't believe that anyone would find the info in the current notification emails an improvement on the previous one, surely everyone else is whining about this? Or is it that the person who set it up initially knew something that I didn't and have done some clever thing that I can't replicate.

Please help me make my FriendFeed room for 'Diabetes Twitterers' better

Shortened link for this post: http://is.gd/2CMKp

A while ago I dipped my toes into creating a FriendFeed room, really just a test of how to do so, in which I added myself and some other Twitter feeds to form a small collection of people who tweet about diabetes - I made it closed so that it wouldn't bother anyone. Then I forgot about it for a while.

Diabetes Twitterers
http://friendfeed.com/diabetestwitterers

Recently I logged on to FriendFeed to find 40 people had requested membership and since I opened up the room it now has 52 people, all of whom are very welcome.

However the room sucks (no offence to the people whose feeds I've used, including my own).

There are two problems that I can see, though more experienced FriendFeedsters might spot more.

One is that each tweet is divorced from its owner - there's nothing to say who said it, it seems as if all tweets in that room are being said by 'Diabetes Twitterers'. I'd like it at least to recognise (ideally with the right photo) who it is that's said the tweet.

Secondly, I have added myself (and others) who talk about diabetes. However I also talk about lots of other stuff and it's currently scraping every single Twitter utterance from my feed (which isn't unexpected but I wonder if it can be improved upon).

Having said that, there are five 't' icons for five twitter feeds and mine isn't among them so I'm not sure how I've managed to appear anyway...

Can I filter my own feed and those of others so that only the tweets we make that mention #diabetes will be picked up by that room? I don't mean just a #diabetes query search being threaded into the room, I do mean filtering my tweets, and those of others whom I've added.

I don't really want a #diabetes search feed in the room as I've seen the output of this on Tweetdeck and there's far too much blether about herbal remedies, raw food and alkaline water and my intention is to keep guff to the minimum ;)

So... can I fix either or both of these problems? How? Having played with the settings I don't think I can, but I'm not that expert yet with FF so all help gratefully received.

Thank you :)