Back to weeknoting again after a hiatus. I write weeknotes for my own benefit, as a way of reflecting on how my work is going. I publish them for two reasons:
- The obvious: some people might be interested.
- Perhaps less obvious: knowing anyone might read this, even if they don’t, improves the quality of reflection.
Sometimes there are things I cannot write about, or things I have to refer to obliquely. If you’re a colleague reading this and find anything frustratingly cryptic, just ask me privately and I can probably say more.
What did I enjoy?
Seeing progress and interest in the work that my team has been part of to get a better view of patient journeys through primary and urgent care. Previously we’ve had partial and anecdotal evidence about problems in these pathways, but not been able to see clearly in data how they intersect. Getting this data linked together is key to making evidence-based decisions about our digital services, as well as to enabling novel ways to learn from the datasets using AI.
A meeting with passionate colleagues from an NHS trust, who came to us wanting to enable self-referral to their cancer services in the NHS App. In a happy accident of timing, we’ve just launched a pilot of something very similar, so will hopefully be able to collaborate with this trust in the next stages of the work.
A first face to face meeting this year for my Digital Urgent & Emergency Care (UEC) leadership team. It was lovely to see everyone in the Leeds office, and we got some good conversations going discussing our recent staff survey and upcoming objective setting.
On Thursday, a non-NHS day, I was in York with 54North Homes, the housing association where I’m a non-executive board member. The formal board meeting was followed by a series of strategy presentations. In one of these I reflected on the association’s roots and how we can continue to invest in the communities where the association’s predecessor organisations were founded.
What was hard?
I was surprised to go into a meeting and be presented with a list of actions from another team in the new NHS England, when I had expected to create a shared plan together. I had gone into the meeting expecting to kick off a positive collaboration, but it didn’t go that way, and the items on the list were not aligned with the recommendations we’d agreed at a board before Christmas. I have made a proposal to put things right and hope we’ll find a way to get the work back on track.
What do I need to take care of?
Our budgets and plans from 1 April onwards are still in a state of flux. This makes it hard to commit to new work with other teams, even though we’re now less than 10 weeks away from the new financial year. There is lots that we could do, and we’re going to have to prioritise hard and fast so as not to overcommit. Although the unit of the negotiation is money, the scarce constraint in reality is skilled people to do the work. They cannot be mobilised and demobilised, or swapped from one thing to another, as quickly as changing the rows on a finance spreadsheet.
Matt Edgar writes here 