Weeknotes s03e23

Andy Callow
Web of Weeknotes
Published in
6 min readJun 25, 2021

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TL;DR: Wishing Prof the best. Spend controls. Re-profiling the NGH EPR programme.

[week ending 25/06/2021]

Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? I joined a call with colleagues from NHSX, and we talked about the concept of spend controls being applied at a local level. I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with spend controls in my time in the NHS. In principle, I fully support them, as it stops public money being spent on rubbish IT projects. However, like all these things the essence is in the execution. I remember going through a process back in the day with, and it felt like the person I was dealing with was a little bit intoxicated with their power, forgetting the principles that they were trying to adhere to and having very little sense of pragmatism. So I was very keen to be involved in some of these early discussions around what this might mean for local trusts going through a spend control process, firstly about the principles being applied, secondly around the time scales it would add onto an already lengthy process to get stuff done and thirdly around the behaviours that it potentially generates.

I caught up with Adam from St Andrews hospital, a charity provider in Northampton. We talked about the strategy that Adam has being developing for their organisation. We had a really good chat about how to turn that strategy into delivery.

Had a call with one of our suppliers, an absolutely massive company that it turns out I knew very little about. They have loads of other services that wasn’t even aware of. This for me was an example of a really good call with a supplier; they knew quite a bit about our organisation, they are able to add some new insight into future developments, and also piqued my interest into some other services in their portfolio, all without the heavy sell.

Nudged on by Rich Corbridge and Thomas Webb, I joined the Q&A session with students from Newcastle University. We had both created videos that the students had watched in during the week; Rich talking about innovation and me talking about turning strategy into delivery. So the point of this session was to allow the students to ask us questions about this what we talked about and it was a fantastic experience really good debate some really chunky questions and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the notable things about this event, is that I’ve never met Thomas in real life, we’ve just interacted mainly via Twitter. I’ve admired some of the things that he’s put out and enjoyed some of the debate, so it was an easy yes when he contacted me out of the blue. I’m hoping to do more.

About the only unflattering photo you’ll see of Rich Corbridge

What did you learn? I’ll stop going on about it eventually, but I broke my collar bone about four weeks ago. This week I had the benefit of care from the Kettering team. I’ve been pretty worried about moving my arm and shoulder over the last few weeks for fear of extending the time that my bone would take to heal, but the visit gave me confidence in what movements I could begin to make that were safe. The whole experience was really humbling, and my overriding feeling was that if all patients going through the fracture clinic get the same level of care as I received then our patients really are in good hands.

I had one of my REACH network one to one slots, talking to somebody from the network about several things that were on their mind as always I learned a lot from the conversation. It was also the KGH REACH network meeting this week which was a really lively conversation.

What did you enjoy? The senior leadership teams from the digital portfolio from both trusts got together to have another go at our efforts to get some benchmarks down in the delivery of the group digital strategy. This has been hard work. But I think that’s fine, the essence of getting some of these metrics right, such that they actually demonstrate user value being delivered, particularly when we’re reaching into new areas is really important. So I expect that in the first pass we won’t have 100% coverage, but will make a decent fist out of proportion of them and continue to iterate those over the next few months.

I ended the week by joining the virtual meeting to bid farewell for Professor Andrew Chilton, stepping down in his role as medical director at Kettering. Thankfully he’s still staying on and being involved in other parts of the organisation. Rabia and Claire did a brilliant job of pulling together comments, daft videos and a hilarious quiz to give Andrew a fitting send off. It was really lovely to hear all the great things that people said about him. He’s been the Medical Director at Kettering for over 10 years, meaning he’s seen so many of the changes that have happened in the organisation. Andrew and Leanne have really acted as the bulwalk of the leadership team throughout all the ups and downs and changes in the organisation. Andrew has been a fantastic colleague and I’m really delighted that he will still be around to continue working with.

Goodbye gif. source: https://giphy.com/gifs/theoffice-episode-12-the-office-tv-k3YNVBrbn2KqbXEgDJ

What did you achieve? We made some good progress on EPR re-planning at NGH this week. As I’ve mentioned before, the process for obtaining Digital Aspirant funding has meant that we’ve had to look at our time scales again. So what we’ve been doing over the last few weeks is to look to see if we can maintain the same overall schedule but sequence things in a slightly different manner. We had some pretty good conversations this week around the funding that was being agreed and whether we could make that work in this financial year work with the revised ambitions. Towards the end of the week I think we managed to get all the things lined up to make that possible, so Phil and I are going to the Hospital Management Team (HMT) meeting next week to see how that lands with colleagues.

What are you looking forward to next week?

  • Ian, Dan, Phil and I have a strategy planning day where we’re going to talk about what we need to do over the next six months to put the group digital strategy into action.
  • A session with my reverse mentor
  • The official launch of the Kettering and Northampton hospital group

Interesting Stuff read/consumed:

  • Weeknotes: week 30/31 Coming to the crunch — Neil Lawrence. Concept of Sociocracy — “it addresses the problem of how you make decisions in groups in a way that focuses on consent while keeping the governance just tight enough to ensure focused discussions”. Leading me to watch a video, noting the great phrase: “Good enough for now, and safe enough to try”.
  • What I’m doing to be a white ally by Jody Hall. ‘Establish “stay interviews”’. According to The Balance Career “A stay interview is preferable because you ask current employees why they continue to work for your organization. At the exit interview, it’s too late to identify and solve the problems for the exiting employee. The results of a stay interview give you knowledge about what the organization can improve now and how you can retain your remaining, valued employees. You also learn what your organization or department is doing well when employees identify what they like about their current position”

Books finished this week:

Currently Reading:

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Husband. Dad to 3 smashing lads. Cub Leader. MAMIL. CDIO for Nottingham University Hospitals. Ex UHN and NHS Digital. Views own. Always learning.