What did I enjoy?
Spending time with my peers and the Product & Platforms senior leadership team, and with my own leadership team for Digital Urgent & Emergency Care (UEC). Both teams have now been fully staffed and stable for long enough that we can have rich conversations and challenge each other. That wasn’t so true even a few months ago.
What did I learn?
I caught up a few times with colleagues working on the First Contact initiative across primary, urgent and community care. They have a tricky balance to strike. On one hand, they must show early value from their work with small but tangible delivery. On the other, they have to keep casting their net wide with a big, bold, but inevitably woolier, long term narrative. They run into problems when stakeholders looking for one of those things think they’re too fixated on the other.
What was hard?
I was concerned that important performance data reported to the most senior levels was only about the telephony side of our services, totally missing the fact that almost 30% of interactions in my part of the NHS are now digital first. Of course we have a long way to go in our transformation, but are we in danger of “squeaky wheel” syndrome where the noise about the most analogue parts of the service gets lots of attention while the more digitally advanced areas just quietly get on with it?
What do I need to take care of?
When a meeting pops into my diary with the word “governance” in the subject line, I always check whether it’s really a conversation about governance that we need, or a concern about a particular decision that has not gone the way someone wanted. There are a couple of instances at the moment where decision-making is not pleasing everyone. I need to spend time next week making sure that we’ve really thought things through and come to the best position we can within the constraints that all teams in our organisation are facing right now.
Matt Edgar writes here 