My mentor and friend has persuaded me to start spending more time reflecting and suggested a monthly blog with some reflections from each month would be a good idea. I get pretty bad social media anxiety to be honest – I worry that I’ll say the wrong thing or leave someone or something out and cause offence so I’m not going to name individuals but will tag you in when I share.

So here are some reflections and key moments from the last month in between the papers, the urgent requests and the back-to-back teams calls! Here we go…

The major thing of note this month is that I’m back to working on a Monday after my youngest started primary school. It’s like the flood gates have opened and my Mondays are packed with work. It’s easy to think that you can’t do certain jobs on flexible hours, but you can, and I did. I’ve been supported to progress my career as a CIO and Deputy Director and do a job I love whilst having the time I wanted with Herbert and Fred (6 and 4) and I’m feeling so grateful to the North West Ambulance Service (my employer), my line manager and all of my teams for supporting me to work flexibly. It’s scary sometimes to ask for flexible working hours especially when you’re trying to progress and start new roles, but you need to remember that wanting a little more time with your family does not mean you’re not the right person for the role. As a manager, in my experience, the more you give to your staff the more you get back from them.

Anyway – Fred has been learning the school values, one of which is ‘resilience’. My husband has been away for a couple of weeks with work, the kids have been poorly, it’s been tough! Of course everything breaks as soon as Harry (husband) walks out the door and the bath plug broke. Every night it’s been driving me mad, I just keep pushing it and pushing it to try and let the water out and Fred says ‘”be resilient Mummy”. To him being resilient means to just keep going and don’t give up and he’s right eventually the plug opens. We talked about it at an away day for the Quality Sirectorate senior managers this month – has Fred got it right? Is it that no matter how hard it gets, how relentless the pressures are in the NHS – going in to winter after a summer that already felt like winter – that we just keep going and don’t give up? Perhaps – but we also talked about taking time to look after our wellbeing, having mechanisms in place to understand and manage our stress levels, supporting one another and working smarter.

Digital Champions

We had our first away day with some of digital champions this month. The digital champions are a group of NWAS staff who have volunteered above and beyond their roles to lead on new digital change and support their colleagues as we roll out new solutions. They are amazing and are such a vital part of our digital transformation. Right across the organisation they are coming up with new ideas and helping those who are less confident with technology. I opened the day by sharing some thoughts about innovation and what we might learn from the pirates. Turns out the pirates were social innovators, they believed in equality by gender and race and even had health support! They did break the rules as many would think but they also re wrote and made new rules which they followed together. There is a great book called ‘Be More Pirate’ by Sam Conniff if you’re interested.

Let’s Talk Cyber

Lots of talk about cyber security this month – the IT and IG teams are just doing a fab job on this and there is so much work behind the scenes that keeps us safe but it’s still a real focus for us. We’ve had some great supportive conversations at Exec about continuing to grow our IT resilience – more details to come for any of team reading this.

Make the Data Sing

We had a great BI session with our senior ops managers this month where we took some time to explore the developments we’ve made in Power BI. The BI team reps were amazing, we had a little quiz to get started and then posed questions that people then went searching to find the answers for using the self-access interactive dashboards available to all. This led to a series of great discussions around the data, further questions the data posed, and the new insight that had been gathered. 

Quality, Innovation and Improvement Directorate Teams

As part of my new interim role as Deputy for the Directorate I’ve been fortunate to spend more time with different teams. This month I’ve been working with the Mental health team who are doing a brilliant job working with partners on new joint response models to provide a better response to our mental health patients. I also spent some time getting to know the high intensity users team who were a delight. I was really busy that week but in one visit to Whitefield (a station I hadn’t been to before) I got to learn about that team, met with the Community First responder lead by chance who showed me some fab digital work they’ve been doing and bumped in to the partnership and patient experience leads – all conversations I would never have had sat in my office – which I do do a lot of – but it’s so important to force yourself out and about. We also had a senior manager away day focussed on building our improvement science skills and using them day to day. The improvement team led the way sharing their experience and knowledge and it was lovely to see them in their element!

Women’s Network Launch

I was really fortunate to be asked to facilitate the launch of the NWAS women’s network this month. We had a brilliant day and heard so many amazing stories from inspirational NWAS women. We also had some upfront difficult conversations but came away with an energy to support one another and drive change. The committee that are driving the network and the day are just brilliant and did a fab job.

Final Thought

This quote was shared with me this month and it’s so reflective of the experience of so many people leading change. Machiavelli wrote this in the 16^th century and it’s still so true. He goes on to talk about the reaction of others to the innovator – I’ve always said it can be a lonely place – but just having this quote shared I know inspired people in the team and myself to keep going and not take it personally – we will be resilient, we will look after one another, we’ll use improvement science to work smarter, we will learn, we will fail but we will also succeed!