Reflections: 18 months into Group CDIO role

This blog is a little overdue, as I’m now nearing 2 years in my role as Group Chief Digital Information Officer at the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire (Northampton and Kettering General Hospitals), but promised myself that I’d get this out anyway.

I use my weeknotes as a regular reflective discipline. However, this is an opportunity to take a longer look back, as I did at 12 and 6 months in into this role.

L-R, T-B: Celebrating Black History Month at NGH. Seeing old friends in person at Rewired 2022 (where I caught Covid!). Visiting the People Directorate at NGH with Debbie, KGH CEO. Opening the UHN AHP Conference with Melanie Paragreen. Paula Kirkpatrick and I visiting Pathology at NGH. Shadowing the Service Desk team at NGH. A still of me talking about the HPN South conference which I chaired. A diagram of the Digital Services we offer. Me doing the opening address of the Midlands Digital Health Skills Development Conference. My ugly face printed on the surface of a coffee at Rewired 2022. Ready to work with the Housekeeping staff at KGH. With Faizal and Ramandeep at Digital Health Summer School 2022.

What has gone well?

1. Full Recruited to Digital Leadership Team. By July this year, all the Heads of Service roles were filled and that allowed us to start planning for the next phase of bringing the two hospital digital teams together as one. I’ve been really impressed at how the team have quickly gelled together.
2. ICS Digital Strategy Approved. At my 12 month refelections, I talked about frustration in getting a refreshed digital strategy for the ICS underway. This month it was approved by the Integrated Care Board and I’m really proud of it as direction of travel for Northants [next step is to get it online and visible to all].
3. Getting all Targeted Investment Funding (TIF) contracts over the line. As with much of NHS funding it is strictly linked to financial years. As the ICS who were awarded the highest amount for any region, which was only confirmed late in the financial year, we had a race, to award contracts by 31 March, which we did. The work taking place since has been to implement and embed the pieces of software to help with the outpatient transformation.
4. Mentoring Conversations. I’ve put more focus on some mentoring conversations, both within the digital directorate and also with colleagues from the REACH network. There was one conversation I had a couple of months ago that was so impactful on the mentee and I that it gave me the impetus to give the UHN Career Conversations Network the final push needed to launch this month. This is a group of willing senior leaders who have allocated time in their diaries to have informal career conversations with BAME staff.
5. Midlands Digital Health Skills Development Conference. I was asked to co-chair this network over a year ago, and it’s been a gradual process to develop the network and its work. So it was wonderful to be able to open our first conference in September this year, which a fantastic set of speakers and feel the buzz in the room throughout the day. Only challenge now is we’ve set the bar very very high for future events!

What have I struggled with?

1. Organisational Change. The restructure for the Group digital directorate has taken much longer than I’d originally anticipated and advised. This has caused frustration in many parts of the team, and despite wanting to give some certainty about timelines, some things have been out of our control.
2. The Firebreak Failing. At the 12 month point, I was celebrating the fact that the organisation had supported a Health Intelligence Firebreak — giving the team 12 weeks of focus on an important piece of work to establish core data sets and a set of dashboards. This ultimately failed. As a result, there has been signficiant personal and professional reputational damage, to me and to the team, which is taking some time to repair. I can see I let myself be convinced by techo-optimism and didn’t test the assumptions closely enough. I also didn’t spot it was going off track when I could have done and called pause.
3. NGH EPR Business Case Process. The whole process of seeking national funding to support the Northampton Electronic Patient Record procurement and implementation has been incredibly frustrating and it feels like a number of hurdles have come out of the blue along the way. We’ve now been trying to get this business case approved nationally in one way or another for over a year. In the meantime, the opportunity to give the organisation hope for a better digital future has been challenging when approval timescales are beyond our control.
4. Northamptonshire Care Record (NCR). I made the mistake of announcing that this would be going live in November 2021. It still isn’t live to everyone. Currently a small group of clinicians across UHN have access to it as part of a usability pilot. Whilst the feedback is positive so far, it is frustrating not to see this important tool not in the hands of those who could use it to improve care.

What have I discovered about myself?

1. Intellectual Stimulation Comes in Many Guises. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been covering for my boss’s absence as interim Group CEO. What’s been fascinating about that has been the revelation that I’ve enjoyed large parts of the work, especially since being CEO which was never ever on my career path. There’s some really big things that I was part of the conversation for, but never looked on to lead on, which I am now to a large extent. The technical challenge of my substantive role as CDIO provides a lot of intellectual stimulation but I have been pleasantly surprised to find similar stimulation in the new challenges that I now find on my plate.
2. I’m much more resilient when I’m exercising. Not so much as a new discovery, but a very stark contrast between this 6(ish) months and the previous six. For pretty much all of the previous six I was unable to do any exercise other than walking due to my long-to-heal collarbone break. I’ve really noticed the contrast between the two periods about how I’ve been better equipped to cope with the ups and downs of a stressful job when I have an outlet of cycling. A good reason why cycling remains on my Personal Goals for 2022, and is also included in my longer-term Courageous Goals.

What are the things I have appreciated?

1. My family. In particular my wife. We passed our 26 years of marriage milestone this year and I’ve come to realise how having a stable homelife, makes hard, stressful jobs doable. I can’t imaging how tough it would be to have a difficult day at work and then go home to more turmoil at home. I know that not everyone is as fortunate as me, so I try not to take the harmony at home (with Mrs C as the source) for granted and do give thanks to God most days for it.
2. Changing the Car. At the end of last year I got an electric car through one of the salary sacrifice schemes at work. This has made my long commute (170 miles round trip) more doable. My other car is 14 years old and hasn’t got any connectivity to phone or sat nav, so it was quite a jump in functionality getting my first ever brand new car! It’s helped the long journey to be able to listen to podcasts and to do phone calls safely.

Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Tikes-Classic-Coupe-Ride/dp/B001NQHN7S/

Update on some things I committed to do in my last reflection:

• Making Significiant progress on Groupwide Digital Function. As mentioned above, this has been frustrating for many people. I can see a path emerging for the next few months, which will see this being completed.
• Developing the ICS Digital Strategy. Completed and approved.
• Building the new Digital Leadership team. We probably haven’t spent as much time together as I hoped and envisaged 6 months ago. Some of this has been due to us using some of our scheduled development time to focus on restructure stuff.
• Getting TIF Schemes over the line. All contracts awarded, but still some hard yards to go on getting the components embedded.