What did you enjoy?
An in-person meeting in Leeds with colleagues looking at how NHS 111 will evolve in the future. We ran through the vision and purpose for the service, how we work alongside primary care, commissioning and contracting, workforce, and digital enablers. I’m lookng forward to seeing the outcome of further engagement on this work, including with representatives of patients and carers.
On Wednesday, I was at the Canary Wharf office for the first “big room planning” session across our new NHS England product and platforms teams. This is something we really should have done a long time ago, and I am pleased it will now be a quarterly fixture.
While our teams were working through the quarterly planning process, some of my leadership team colleagues and I took time to discuss the “first point of contact” work that I kicked off late last year. We currently have a small discovery team on it, but if we’re to make a real difference to patient experiences, we’ll need to spread the next phases of the work across other teams too. Straight after that senior team meeting was the discovery team’s show and tell, so we sat together in the room and watched that. They did a great job explaining their progress in a complex problem space.
What do you wish you could have changed?
A couple of colleagues from my team weren’t able to join the big room planning. I’m sure they’d have brought a lot to it if they had.
I myself would have liked to have stayed in London for day 2 of the planning workshop, but I had to get home due to a prior commitment to 54North Homes, the Yorkshire-based housing association where I’m a non-executive board member. I always enjoy meeting with the 54North board, exec team and customers.
What did you learn?
It was eye-opening to see 3 months-worth of work across all the Product & Platforms teams brought together on one big wall. We spend a lot of time talking about processes, recruitment, and approvals, but not enough focusing together on the actual work we do, and how our teams can help each other out.
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation?
On Wednesday morning, I dialled in to the monthly meeting of digital leaders from the UK’s ambulance trusts, whose organisations we support in NHS England Digital Urgent & Emergency Care (UEC).
And on Friday, I joined a regular catch-up with one of our suppliers.
What are you looking forward to next week?
A monthly in-person meeting of our Digtal UEC leadership team in Leeds, and no doubt more work on our business planning for the next financial year.
Matt Edgar writes here 