What did I enjoy?
The highlight for me was an event hosted by Leeds City Council and the Cabinet Office’s ‘Test, Learn and Grow’ team to explore a collaborative approach to neighbourhood health. It was a rare chance to catch up with colleagues from my national role and home city in the same big room, with inspiring introductions from our Lord Mayor, Healthwatch Leeds, and the LS14 Trust.
James, who I got to meet in person for the first time at the event, has written up his thoughts here: Neighbourhoods as engines of change, On the need for bridges from the edges to the centre.
The organisers shared the story of Mercy, from Chapeltown, who has brilliantly documented what went well and what was frustrating in her experience of care. I was struck by the way that the smallest interactions – both analogue and digital – can inadvertently disempower if not well co-designed with the people involved.
And afterwards I reflected on the unnecessary gulf between national teams – many of which like mine have a big presence in Leeds – from the nearby people and communities who are already committed to improving the health of their neighbourhoods.
The event at the Civic Hall brought back memories of the kind of interactions I was part of in the city a decade ago, including the Leeds GovJam events, where a similar coalition of the willing worked together at pace to build prototypes and social capital. The next Global GovJam is happening in November 2025. Who’s up for making it happen in Leeds?
And what else?
The previous week’s unseasonably warm weather made it a pleasure to be out and about, working from home on Monday, in the Leeds office on Tuesday, a trip to the London office on Wednesday, and to York on Thursday afternoon for a housing association board meeting.
This week I had another day in London, joining a policy team’s away day, which helped me get to know the team better and find out more about their current work.
We also ran a deep dive session for a national director on our work in access, triage and navigation. I enjoyed seeing the story come together as product shared their progress so far and plans for the next few months.
Having refreshed the contents of the wall behind my desk in the office the previous week, I used it a couple of times to explain to colleagues how different priorities fit together in what is going to be transitional 12 months between old and new ways of structuring our work.
What do I need to take care of?
After some difficult conversations over several months where I have tried to persuade colleagues in another part of the organisation to move forward with the analogue to digital agenda, a colleague helped me to see that this wasn’t working. In my exasperation, I was pushing away the people I wanted so badly to collaborate. I took the decision to pause those conversations because the time was not right. We can come back to them when the wider context is clearer.
Since the abrupt announcement of the abolition of NHS England and its integration into the Department of Health and Social Care, I’ve noticed that different parts of the organisation have started telling themselves wildly different stories about why the changes are happening. Strangely, they all seem to be variants on a theme: “the old organisation failed because everyone else wasn’t more like us.” I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this post-rationalisation myself. If we’re to get through this next phase of organisation change together, we need to cultivate a curiosity about what others in our complex multi-professional system are seeing that we might not.
Matt Edgar writes here 