We are delighted to announce that this week we start working with the lovely folk at the UCL Division of Psychiatry to bring their journal club to Twitter.

The first event takes place at 2-3pm on Wednesday 18th May. It will be live broadcast on YouTube so you can watch it in full.

We will also be live tweeting the journal club discussion so you can all contribute to the conversation, by asking questions and making comments using the #UCLJournalClub hashtag.

What paper will we be discussing?

This important open access study published last year in the BMJ:

Sheehan R, Hassiotis A, Walters K, Osborn D, Strydom A, Horsfall L. et al. (2015 ) Mental illness, challenging behaviour, and psychotropic drug prescribing in people with intellectual disability: UK population based cohort study. BMJ 2015; 351 :h4326

The objectives of this study were to:

To describe the incidence of recorded mental illness and challenging behaviour in people with intellectual disability in UK primary care and to explore the prescription of psychotropic drugs in this group.

This is an important topic that we’ve covered before on the National Elf Service:

Psychotropic medications: scale and patterns of prescribing to people with learning disabilities

How can you get involved?

• Read the BMJ paper (it’s free to download)
• Write down a few notes, what you think of the paper, and any questions you have
• Watch the live video of the journal club, which will begin at 2pm on Wednesday 18th May
• Tweet your questions and comments to #UCLJournalClub

Who will be present at the journal club?

• Authors of the BMJ study: Angela Hassiotis and André Strydom
• Staff from the UCL Division of Psychiatry
• The UCL Mental Health Sciences Research MSc students, some of who will present the paper at the start of the meeting
• Little old me – André Tomlin, tweeting as the @LearningDisElf

What if I can’t make it on Wednesday?

Don’t despair! We’ll be blogging the paper soon, so you can still read our summary of this important study.

Of course you can still read the paper and tweet us your questions. If they’re devastatingly clever and witty, we may even put them to the study authors on Wednesday.