Weeknotes s03e02
TL;DR: Appointing NGH CCIOs! Brain dumping to everyone.
[week ending 15/01/2021]
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? Brief catch up with System C on Vitals upgrade and Maternity reporting for KGH.
I was humbled to be asked to join Andy Kineer and James Freed (HEE) from around the country to talk with Sonia Patel (NHSX CIO) about the role of technology in the ICS. A really well facilitated session where we actually spent a lot of time typing into shared Google docs rather than talking — which worked great.
What would you have liked to do more of? Talking about the admission challenge I tweeted about this weekend. I had a chat with John from Google who’d picked up on the Tweet. I was impressed at his knowledge of the ways hospitals work. Less impressed by his choice of lunch omelette. I’ve had a couple of other good responses to the Tweet that I’m following up, but would have loved to have managed to spend more time on this.
What did you enjoy? So much about this week that I enjoyed…
Interviewing with Matt for the NGH CCIO post — leading to the appointment of Alistair and Tristan. Two super enthusiastic digital clinicians that I’m going to really enjoy working with. I gave them a few hours to bask in the glow of celebration before bombarding them with a stack of information on my current thinking and some background stuff.
Learning more about the PACS system at KGH, courtesy of Andy. This was an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast with the visit I’d done to NGH the Friday before. I also got to see some reporting happening in real life and seeing the speech recognition software in action.
Properly kicking off the NGH EPR Programme, with the onboarding of the company who will be helping us. I did a massive long email with a brain dump of things to think of. Getting them on board will be a massive boost and get things moving at pace.
Joining the NGH IT Clinical Senate, where we talked about design principles and themes for the Group Digital Strategy, progress on EPMA implementation, the EPR Programme and options for document scanning.
Having a catch up with Adrian and Ajay, the KGH CCIOs. We’ve not managed to meet for one reason and another for a few weeks, so it was good to hear what they’re up to and share some thoughts on the Group Digital Strategy.
A Time Out session with fellow Group Execs, where we discussed about how we work, how we communicate and what challenges are on the horizon. This was followed by a chat about the forecast COVID numbers and actions we need to take.
I really enjoyed hearing about the massive progress the KGH developers have made on standing up the vaccination booking service. I gave them all a ring during the week to say thank you, and got to admire one of them for siezing the moment and asking for a new laptop. How could I refuse!
What did you achieve? I made a start on putting together the skeleton for the Group Digital Strategy. I’ll be doing a lot of work on this and collaborating with loads of people on it over the next few weeks so looking forward to the discussions that will develop from that.
I had a few conversations with agencies about the discharge service design work I talked about last week. I fear that we may need to park it for a few weeks due to the operational pressures on the hospitals. During this process I realised that for some, the role of digital service design was not understood, as I got CVs for ex-Chief Operating Officers, RTT Pathway Managers and all sorts. I ended up channelling my inner Matt Edgar and pointing people at the DDaT role description.
What are you looking forward to next week?
- Being Director on Call over the weekend. Always learn something.
- Leadership Bookclub with NGH and KGH colleagues — we’ll be discussing Humble Leadership
- Meeting to talk more about the Northamptonshire Care Record
- The first meetings of the Northampton and Kettering Digital Operational Meetings (NDOM and KDOM).
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? Interesting conclusion about consulting firms hiring “insecure overachievers” who find it hard to measure their success.
Books finished this week:
- Fiction: The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle. Too foody and winey and not enough plot for me. Now in the charity box.
- Non-Fiction: None
Currently Reading:
- Non-Fiction: Discipleship by David Watson.
- Non-Fiction: Humble Leadership by Edgar H. Schein
- Fiction: Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Getting in to a meaty classic early in the year to address the gap identified in my Personal Goals for 2021.
