Weeknotes s06e19
TL;DR: Report approval woes. Developing a Digital Equity Charter. Guilty pleasures of business case reviewing.
[week ending 26/07/2024]
(This has been written wholly on my phone whilst travelling so will have to retrospectively add some links etc)
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? I had a brief conversation with Ade, who is doing a piece of research with Mastek. He’s got such a wealth of experience that I’m sure I learnt as much from him as I was able to impart in the other direction.
I managed to have a chat with Paul, the CIO of Boots. Ever since I joined NUH, when Rich Corbridge was there, I’ve been trying to arrange a knowledge sharing meeting between our organisations, given the close proximity. We chatted about the scope of a potential meeting and I followed up with a short document, suggesting an agenda.
What do you wish you could have changed? On Monday I cycled to QMC, only to find my face to meetings were at City Hospital. As a result, I experienced my first journey on the Medilink — the bus that traverses between sites. So more attention to the calendar needed. To get home I did Medilink back to QMC, cycled to train station, then straight to play football from the station at the other end. Took me about 10 mins before my legs changed from cycling to running mode
What situation caused the strongest emotional response this week? I presented a paper to our Financial Sustainability Board, which received a lot of objections. Some of this could have been preempted by discussions with some colleagues ahead of the meeting, but we were working to meeting agenda timelines. As I went through the day’s meetings after that experience, I was conscious of how it was hard to keep my thoughts on the work/meeting in hand and not be dragged back to thinking about what I should have done. It did bring to mind some of the learning from my Kings Fund Top Manager Programme about stuff just below the surface playing into “the here and now”. This experience is not new to me, but I still felt flattened by it and spent a restless night thinking about it over and over. The next morning I was able to synthesize these thoughts into some more measured reflections and practical next steps that I discussed with Ricardo. The other thing I observed in this was that despite the feelings of upset and frustration, the familiarity if this was I knew the cycle of intense feelings don’t last long as measured reflections turn into practical actions.
What did you learn? Still learning more about the impact of the Crowdstrike incident and how it has affected different Trusts in different ways.
This week was the divisional performance reviews. The structure of these have been tweaked to align with our strategic priorities, and starts with the best bit which is a summary of achievements since the last meeting
Last week I visited the radiology department at QMC, this week I went to the City. The difference was that we weren’t in the middle of a global outage and people could do their work. I observed a cancer multi-disciplinary meeting in action, and saw the speed in which cases are reviewed and the pressure on radiologists to have the correct images shared at the right time as the team went through the list at a high pace.
What did you enjoy? I joined colleagues from across the Digital health space to workshop the contents of a Digital Health Equity Charter, hosted at the Kings Fund. This was the follow on from the declaration made at Rewired in March earlier this year. I met quite a few new people and some familiar faces, including Victoria who facilitated the session brilliantly. I’d not seen Victoria since she facilitated a team away day back when I was at NHS Digital so it was good to catch up and reminisce how the building didn’t allow her dog to enter, so the team took it in turns to mind her dog whilst she ran the session.
What did you achieve? Ricardo, Colin and I had a really productive planning session, looking ahead at a roadmap for introducing a Quality Management System and the exit of the partners we have on board, supporting our financial sustainability programme. What was fabulous was how the rough storyboard for a report that was in my head was adapted and improved by the three of us standing round a whiteboard for an hour or so.
Marc and I had several data protection-related conversations. This week is the week we make the transition to the national NHS.net email tenant, so we talked quite a bit about retention policies, legacy data and a roadmap for enacting the changes needed.
I’m the Exec lead for one of our financial sustainability programmes called Standardise, Centralise and Digitise. This week I reviewed four of the business cases associated with the programme and provided comment on them all. The strange thing is that over the past few years I’ve realised that I really like the process of reviewing a document like and assessing if the narrative flow works and will achieve its objective. If you’d said to me that writing a good document is a pleasurable intellectual challenge, back in the days when I wrote software for a living I’d have laughed you out of the room. However, there are some similarities with the highly immersive intellectual challenge of writing software — the need to hold the big picture in your head whilst chipping away at loads of smaller components, the striving for comprehension and resisting the temptation to write something clever over something that is more understandable (and maintainable).
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- NHS Financial Management and Sustainability by the National Audit Office. Although I actually read the summary document. It ends with the stark words “Either much future demand for healthcare must be avoided, or the NHS will need a great deal more funding, or service levels will continue to be unacceptable and may even deteriorate further.”
- Building bridges across boundaries — Part one. “Planning is a valuable learning process. But it relies on the quality of the questions asked.”
- Toxic hospital culture putting women and babies at risk, warn maternity experts.
- Evaluating multiple Wardley Maps through node profile diagrams in Glamorous Toolkit.
- Week notes: 8 – 14 July 2024 by Neil Williams.
- Superb thread from Betina Ross on X about the response to the Crowdstrike incident from the point of service management.
- X article — Researchers at MIT have questioned whether SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) actually work.
Books finished this week:
- Fiction: The Hard Way by Lee Child.
- Non-Fiction: none
Currently Reading:
- Non-Fiction: Not started, but have picked two candidates off the shelf.
- Fiction: The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding .
