What did you enjoy?
Friday was the one clear, dry, calm day of the week in Leeds, so I took the opportunity to get back on my bike. In previous years I’ve struggled to keep up the cycling to work habit after the clocks went back. Promising myself that this year will be different, I must remember to charge up my lights and dig out the full-fingered gloves before Monday.
I really enjoyed an in-person meeting of the Digital Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) leadership team. We worked along a big whiteboard wall to look at individual team members’ objectives and how they mapped onto our overall objectives as a team. I’d hoped to do this earlier in the year, but it felt timely to be having this conversation now that everyone has been confirmed in their posts as part of our reorganisation.
Our overall objectives cover the operation and continuous improvement of the national digital services that support 111 and 999, with specific focus areas written into the UEC Recovery Plan and NHS England business plan, including:
- A platform rebuild of the UEC Directory of Services to improve how we direct people to the most appropriate service
- Promoting the use of data to assess demand and capacity across UEC
- Supporting the expansion of streaming at the front doors of Emergency Departments and Urgent Treatment Centres to help ensure patients are seen in the right place
- Integrating 111 online with the NHS App to make it easier for patients to be directed to the right care
Looking to the future, we’re also committed to:
- Starting co-design work around people’s first point of contact and preliminary assessment that spans self-care, primary care, community and urgent care
- Implementing a system of joined up business planning for Digital UEC as part of the new NHS England
- Nurturing a diverse and inclusive multidisciplinary team environment across Digital UEC where all colleagues have a chance to flourish and develop their careers.
What did you learn?
The conversation confirmed to me that our objectives were broadly correct, but there was an important area of work that I had not explicitly stated. Based on the workshop I drafted an additional objective around recruitment and procurement, both of which will take up a lot of leadership time over the coming months, and are essential to setting our teams up for success.
The whiteboard activity also highlighted some things where we need to be clearer on who is leading, and a couple of gaps where we might need to put additional focus.
What would you have liked to do more of?
I had two separate meetings focused on how we articulate and track outcomes and benefits from our work on digital for UEC. It’s a tricky topic because digital alone is rarely the answer to the large and intractable problems that our NHS services face.
We need to show a logical link between our work on digital and better outcomes for patients and frontline staff – but to do it in a way that does not overclaim our role or underplay the importance of all the other changes that need to take place to maximise the return on investment in our products and services. Various different initiatives have tried to do this, but I have yet to see it mapped out really clearly.
What do you wish you could have changed?
I felt bad sending back detailed comments on a draft of the monthly highlight report that we submit to senior leadership. Colleagues had put a lot of effort into the report – perhaps ironically too much effort – and I know how I’d have felt if I was on the receiving end of this feedback on a Friday morning.
Most of my comments were some variant of “Can we either show the impact of this on patients and frontline staff, or remove it from the report, please?” We seemed to have got into a pattern of including dozens of separate items, but without clearly stating the “so what” for many of them. The consequence was that senior leaders receiving the report wouldn’t be able to see the wood for the trees.
Worse, in a large hierarchical organisation, these reports get further condensed for inclusion in ever-more high-level reporting. The higher up the chain they go, the less able the people doing the condensing are to make informed choices about what to leave out.
I’m trying to get to a position where we highlight far fewer things to senior leadership, but for the ones we do, we explain the work and its impact in a jargon-free way.
What are you looking forward to next week?
- Building further on the work we did this week on team objectives
- A meeting of government digital and data leaders in London
- Ten one-to-one conversations with colleagues and line managers
- Weather-permitting, some more cycling to and from work
Matt Edgar writes here 