Newcastle has a history of pioneering leadership in the field of paediatrics. In fact, one of the UK’s first paediatric hospitals, the Fleming Memorial Hospital for Sick Children, opened here in the 1860s.

By the late 1890s, we had a second paediatric hospital, the Sanderson Children’s Hospital, where some of the first groundbreaking work in paediatric orthopaedics was carried out.

And, in the last century, Sir James Spence – the UK’s first full-time paediatrician – founded the social paediatrics subspecialty, and revolutionised our understanding of child mortality (and much more besides) through the Newcastle Thousand Families Study.

The Great North Children’s Hospital – of which this is a particularly bad photo – is a £100m development opened in 2010. It is but the next step in this illustrious journey. It’s designed to be as un-hospital like as possible, even including a teenage “penthouse” on the top floor, with a pool table, massive flat screen TV, and some of the best views in the city. It also has unrivalled medical facilities, of course, including a genuinely world-leading “bubble unit” for kids with severe immunity problems.

Who knows what the next step will be?

This is a tiny bit of the Royal Society of Medicine’s incredible library, which is one of the biggest medical libraries in Europe. It’s spread over four floors, holding over half a million volumes – with around a thousand new ones added each year. It holds books dating back to the 1400s – when the occasional outbreak of Black Death was still claiming the lives of young Londoners. Even I couldn’t resist pulling a book off the shelf and reading for a while.

I think bringing Wendy here would be dangerous: she’s can easily spend an hour looking at the fairly pitiful selection of medical books in our local Blackwell’s, and has even taken her mum to the BMA library when on holiday! If I brought her here, she might move in… especially if she knew there’s a Mango nearby!

I’ve been again to give blood today (you should too – see blood.co.uk). My local donor centre has just replaced its beds with these reclining chairs… I have to say that I found the process of being reclined a little unnerving!

This pair of signs features in the car park of one of my local hospitals. It’s hardly the end of the world that two nearby signs contradict one another, but I would’ve liked to think, even if only for the sake of neatness, that the person putting up the new sign on the left would have obscured or removed the old sign on the right.

I wonder, too, whether the new sign is more effective: how many people would bother to read the small print, and how many would miss the main message given the reduced font size?

This is the Hownsgill Viaduct. It’s 55m high, and a little over 200m long. It used to carry the Stanhope & Tyne Railway, but these days carries only the C2C cycle route. Construction was completed in 1858 to Sir Thomas Bouch’s design.

Bouch would later go on to design the Tay Bridge, which collapsed in use. Seventy-five people were killed, and Bouch’s reputation and career were left in tatters. Whilst the Hownsgill Viaduct is still standing, its fate has become almost as grim: it’s one of the UK’s suicide hotspots. In 2011, there was a death every two weeks. In response, Durham County Council is arranging the construction of a 3m high steel tube and cable fence.

Suicide barriers are a knotty public health issue: whilst they seem logically sound, it’s difficult to come up with strong evidence of their effectiveness. The most famous study in this area (and one which came up in my Part A MFPH, as it happens) is of the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto – where, actually, fewer suicides occurred each year than at Hownsgill. The study suggests that whilst the Luminous Veil barrier prevented suicides from the viaduct itself, it had no impact on the suicide rate as a whole. Of course, study design is a huge problem in this field, but it remains the case that no published study has shown a reduction in the overall suicide rate as a result of the erection of a barrier.

I guess the only thing we know for certain is that suicide is better tackled through comprehensive and wide-ranging suicide prevention programmes rather than through barriers alone. Psychiatry services often suffer when healthcare resources are tight; yet the biggest cause of death in British men under the age of 35 is suicide. Let’s hope that the vital work of mental health teams isn’t dismissed by anyone as “easy pickings” in the ongoing recession.

It’s Annual Review of Competence Progression (ARCP) time for most medical trainees at this time of year. This is where a panel reviews how we’re doing, and how our training is progressing. Most trainees these days have e-portfolios to collect evidence for these annual reviews, but in Public Health in the Northern Deanery, we still use paper… which requires literally hundreds of physical signatures from supervisors, and other numbers from other people, which can make co-ordination something of a challenge!

This picture shows my portfolio carefully balanced on top of my car, as I prepared to hand it in to the Deanery’s office. I’m glad to finally have it finished for another year!

This is the badge I got a few weeks ago for my 25th blood donation. I couldn’t think of anything else to picture today, so thought I’d go for another exhortation to give blood. Check where your next local session is at blood.co.uk or call 0300 123 23 23. Thanks!

If people could actually see inside my brain, all the things I was thinking, it really would be a very bad day.

So said Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, in an interview with Amber Elliott for Total Politics published today. This may be a slightly ill-advised soundbite given that there’s a perception that he’s duping the public with his plans for the NHS.

As it turns out, he’s having a pretty bad day anyway, as doctors have voted to take industrial action over pensions.

I was back at the James Cook University Hospital for a meeting this morning – I previously featured it on 4th April.

I hadn’t ever really noticed until today how pretty the signs outside are. They’re a bit overshadowed by the massive lettering on a nearby fence.

I was going to make a sarcastic comment about the hospital’s “expresso bar”, but it turns out that expresso is, in fact, merely the Spanish to Italian’s espresso. There are, it seems, quite a few expresso bars. So I learned something new there!

It’s my first public health on call tonight: nervously waiting for the phone to ring! It’s about 20 months since I did my last hospital on call, so I’m no longer used to being at the mercy of the phone, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it fairly quickly!