Weeknotes s03e32
TL;DR: Down memory lane and dabbling with Monte Carlo Analysis. Preparing the Health Intelligence firebreak proposal. Exec Away Days.
[week ending 17/09/2021]
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? I joined the Midlands Digital Health Skills Development Network steering group meeting. The work of the network is starting to shape and we discussed the task and finish groups to be set up and the potential special interest groups we may wish to sponsor. Later in the week we had an agenda planning meeting for the next one and talked about planning a conference next year to gain a bit more traction and put a marker down on our ambition for the network.
Dan and I talked to Philip Graham from Blackpool about the work he’s been doing with NHSE about staff passports. I saw a tender advertised a few months ago which piqued my interest, so it was good to finally talk to Philip about the work he’s been doing about standards-based passports, rather than going down a proprietary route. There’s some stuff on Digital Health about the project progress made as part of the pandemic response. It is of massive interest as we’re getting deeper into our collaboration as a hospital group and making it easier for staff to move between our organisations. The only disappointment was that this is still in an alpha stage, so will be a while until we may be able to replicate for our staff.
What would you have liked to do more of? Spend more time with Ian planning the HTN session we have next week. I feel a fraud as my name has been trailed on the promotional material, but Ian will be the star of the show and be talking about the Bed Tetris. Although this started with a conversation with Chief of Surgery at KGH Steve Krikler and led to my tweet that prompted so many great conversations, Ian has done ALL the hard yards to get it from an idea to something that is really happening, so looking forward to his presentation on Monday.
What did you learn? How to do a Monte Carlo Simulation in Excel. I remember experimenting with this as part of my first degree, back before it was available in Excel, so it was good to use some knowledge that I’d somehow managed to retain from over 25 years ago that was still actually useful! I used it in the Winter Modelling work I’ve been invovled with (and written about extensively over the past couple of weeks). We’ve been having some interesting discussions about the best and worst case scenarios of the model and feeling that they weren’t realistic, in that whilst all the parameters had a realistic range based on historical data or reasonable future estimates, ALL the parameters don’t generally go to the extreme point at the same time. This is where Monte Carlo analysis comes in, by randomly varying the four parameters in the model against each other multiple times. If you do it a sufficient number of times, you get a range of potential results, which allows you to infer trends from. The analysis assumes that each parameter follows a normal distribution, which may not be fully correct, but a bit of geeky playing one evening has allowed for a much more helpful illustration on the range of potential results.
I joined the Northants Chief Execs weekly meeting to present the current position of the modelling, which was my first attendance and we had a good discussion about the various parameters of the model and how they were selected, and what might be done to lessen demand.
What did you enjoy? I had two away-day/afternoon sessions this week. The first was with the Exec teams of both hospitals. If I’m honest I approached this session with a bit of a negative attitude, thinking it was a distraction from the shedload of work I needed to do this week and was feeling under pressure to complete. However, I managed to catch up with different colleagues, who sadly I sometimes don’t see much between each Board meeting when we are together. It was actually a really good day — we talked about the feelings and challenges of collaborating as a Group, Rabia did a great session on Compassionism and we did a team exercise that was great fun.
The second away session was on Friday afternoon as a Group Executive. We talked about the Health Intelligence firebreak (see below), how we work most effectively together and the clinical strategy. We also talked about doing some development work together and I raised the idea of doing a User Manual for Me session, which Ian and I have used with the digital teams with positive results. My User Manual is here.
What did you achieve? We made great progress on putting a health intelligence firebreak proposal together for me to present at a Group Exec meeting at the end of the week. The team worked really hard to work out what stuff could stop during the 12 week period and what we could aim for to be delivered during that time. At the start of the week we had a skeleton deck and were having daily meetings to check in on progress and try and remove blockers to getting the proposal together. The day it made massive progress was when Ian, Dan and I were on an Exec away day and didn’t meet with the team — interpret that how you will!
This week was our Collaboration Programme Committee meeting and with lots of help from Becky, I prompted a discussion on the metrics we ought to be discussing regularly at Boards in our Integrated Performance/Governance Report (IPR). The temptation is to have loads of metrics and just keep adding to them, but the more metrics you have, the less time/ability to have to have an in-depth discussion about them. Over time, the number of metrics at both Trusts have proliferated and it is time to a) reduce the number and b) try and get so we use the same set for each Trust. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be discussing at the various Committees which metrics they feel need discussing at Committee vs Board meetings.
What are you looking forward to next week?
- Further session with the digital SLT on the Group Digital Strategy metrics
- Doing some prep work for our Clinical Conference at the start of Oct and setting out what’s been achieved and what is to come
- NGH Digital Team Town Hall
- Spending time with the CNIOs and CCIOs looking at how we use Connect across the Group
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- Weeknotes s01e19 by Jaswant Singh Sagoo
- This Weeks This Week by Amy Freeman. Some leadership in action as Amy reflects on needing to repeat an appraisal session.
- Those virtual battlegrounds … by Simon Wardley. “Video games are now so widespread and immersive that they must be considered a powerful channel for spreading values rivalling that of radio, television and film”
- An Old Programmer Loses His Job by AP Carpen. “Every time I learned a new PC programming language, the industry changed. It made it impossible to keep up with these changes”
Books finished this week:
- Fiction: None.
- Non-Fiction: None
Currently Reading:
- Fiction: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket.
- Non-Fiction: More by Simon Ponsonby.
