Immigration is, as always, a hot topic issue in politics but with UKIP becoming an increasing threat to the right of the Conservative party, there has been a significant increase in what can almost be described as xenophobic rhetoric.

The NHS hasn’t been spared with Jeremy Hunt trying to appear strong on healthcare tourism, the practice of foreign visitors travelling to the UK for the sole purpose of gaining access to high quality healthcare. The Daily Mail, along with many other tabloids, has published sensational articles highlighting the supposed scale of the problem. 

I put together my own visualisation that highlights the scale of the real problems facing the NHS. Please have a look and share it.

It has taken a year for us to get iPi from an idea to a product, not exactly the lean methodology and here’s why - along the way I lost passion for the original idea and, without even immediately realising it, it wrecked my enthusiasm and my productivity.

When we re-focussed and re-imagined iPi into something I truly believe could be a success, I re-built the product in around 12 days and we are ready to launch at the start of 2014.

The lesson in this is that it is absolutely vital to work on things that you are passionate about, no matter what that is. If you are building a startup and you just can’t get the enthusiasm to work on your product, re-examine your product and find out why. 

It’s been about a year since Rod and myself started working on iPi, and then a couple of months after that Paddy joined us.

Since then a lot of hard work has went into various ideas and products, but until now we have not felt ready to launch. That changes in the next couple of weeks.

Our service has changed a lot from what we originally dreamed up, but it is something I am really excited about. We want to solve how medical students and doctors connect with those above them, those in a position to give them great mentoring and teaching.

iPi does just that.

We have built a service that allows people to provide and receive mentoring both online (through video and audio on iPi itself) or in person. What I really like about it is that just about anyone can be a mentor. Junior doctors might give mentoring to medical students, but they themselves can get mentoring from registrars or consultants. We match people up based on skills, specialty interests and location.

On top of that we give medical students and doctors a safe and secure environment to store all of their educational and professional files.

We are in the final stages of testing iPi so expect to see it in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, please go to http://ipimed.com and enter your e-mail address so we can drop you an e-mail as soon as it is released.