A four day week, but we packed a lot in, and much of it not appropriate to rehearse in my public weeknotes.
Some highlights
The picture at the top of the post shows the chocolate bunnies I bought for my leadership team at our monthly in-person meet-up in the Leeds Hub. We spent the start of our meeting discussing some financial year-end cliff edge issues, before I ran a stakeholder mapping activity for the latter part of the session.
We’ve been meeting as a merged leadership team for almost a year now, and Jacqui helpfully led a discussion about how we could improve the effectiveness of these meetings. We intend to add a little more structure – monthly discussions of our highlight report to senior management, and a lightweight action log from meeting to meeting – but without losing the flexibility of an open forum where any member of the team can bring anything they need help with.
I enjoyed a call with some senior colleagues, and a one-to-one later in the week with Mona, my portfolio’s clinical director, about opportunities to use artificial intelligence in our work. We’re optimistic that AI could help us improve services, but also mindful that we have some basics to get right first. It’s a tricky balance made harder by the significant vacancy rate my team is carrying in some of the skills we need to support the growing appetite for this type of innovation.
I learned useful things from a meeting of a cross-government digital leadership steering group where a director from the Ministry of Justice shared the department’s approach to managing continuous improvement of live services with multidisciplinary teams. The model had many similarities with the structure of our own teams.
I enjoyed the end of quarter show and tell put on by the ‘First Contact’ discovery team. It’s been quite a journey for this team, starting with a deliberately wide open brief. As we end this phase of the work, they have converged on a set of opportunities that I really hope we’ll be able to develop further in the new financial year. This is one of our “big bets” for digital, and it needs a whole service solution the spans policy, strategy, and operations too.
Still harder than it should be
My hopes for a quiet wind-down to the bank holiday weekend were dashed when it became apparent that some of the cliff edge issues would not be resolved before the start of the new financial year. Most of Thursday was consumed with the consequences of that, as I suspect will be every day next week. I regret the opportunity cost of the senior leadership attention that has turned inwards to deal with these issues at a time when we ought to be looking out to the needs of patients and the staff who support them.
But first for me, a 4-day break and chocolate. Thoughts with colleagues on the NHS frontline and everyone else who will be working this double bank holiday weekend.
Matt Edgar writes here 