Takeheart Health Check

Dr Geoff Clayton is the author of The Takeheart Health Check

[Heart Attack Prevention Team Work]
TAKEHEART is a husband and wife team.

In early life Dr Geoff Clayton was awarded a scholarship to Eastbourne College and was educated there during the war. National service commissioned in the Royal Signals followed, then a Myerstein scholarship at the Middlesex Hospital and an intercalated BSc in physiology. Junior hospital posts at the Middlesex (medicine and obstetrics), St Anthony's Hospital Cheam (medicine) and Kingston on Thames (pathology) and then into general practice. A year at Putney, ten years in Beccles in Suffolk and the rest in Norwich.
Shirley hails from Nottingham. She qualified SRN at the Middlesex Hospital and we have three grown up children and five grandchildren. We live in a Queen Anne Old Rectory the maintainence of which absorbs a great deal of energy (Click here for a short message for people who have visited us at the Old Rectory). Shirley has an interest in textiles, clothes and costumes. She is the proprietor of "The Eaton Clothes Horse" which she runs from our home in Norwich.
Geoff became interested in the use of computers in the 1960s, and he wrote a system for use in his practice in Norwich that ran successfully for many years. Cobol was the language; the ICL 1900 mainframe at the University of East Anglia the machine; punched cards for input, magnetic tape for storage and a bicycle for communications. In 1971 he was awarded an Upjohn Fellowship by the RCGP which was spent under the supervision of John Perry of the Community Health Project in Oxford. The resulting report (1972 still available through the RCGP) describes the system (399). The card punch machine used in these early days has been donated to the Bletchley Park Museum, it is the size and weight of a piano!
In 1981 the members of The Primary Health Care Specialist Group of the British Computer Society elected him as their first Chairman. Five years later he relinquished this post and became President of the Group. He is now an Honorary Life Member.
It was a natural progression to combine knowledge and experience in preventive medicine with interest in computers to develop the TAKEHEART concept for the prevention of coronary heart disease.

In 1990 the British Computer Society awarded their John Perry Prize (a replica of the bleeding bowl dredged up from the "Mary Rose" of King Henry VIII) to Geoff and TAKEHEART for an outstanding contribution to Primary Health Care computing.