I recently attended NHS Leicester City’s long service awards evening. I wasn’t there as one who was to be honoured. I was there in my official capacity as a senior manager of the organisation who was very grateful to those people who have dedicated their working lives to the NHS.
 
The whole event was lovely (and I choose my words carefully). Invitees had come along with their guests and everyone was scrubbed and ‘dressed up proper’. They were bursting with both funny, and heartbreaking, stories to tell of days gone by. That night we celebrated the long service of nearly 200 people who had worked for 20, 30 and even 40 plus years in the NHS. With over 4,000 combined years of experience in the room, and that’s only our staff, just think of how much knowledge we have to tap for service improvement across the Leicester economy and even the country. We must do all we can to capture that experience and use it to nurture and grow our own new ideas.
 
Coincidently, the same week also saw the start of the most exciting bit of the project for me – the redesign of the stroke pathway. My aim is to get a core group of multi-professional people joining forces to do this bit of the project – seems like they’re best placed to me! I don’t know how much experience they have of the NHS between them but I bet it’s heaps.

But, oh how to manage them? The group are so positive and engaged they’re difficult to keep under control. They are keen, enthusiastic and dedicated. They all talk at once and they have so much to say. The acute professionals want to know what their community counterparts are up to and the consultant wants to understand that particular issue from a GP’s perspective.

I don’t understand a lot of it but I do acknowledge that they need to do this networking stuff first. Routinely, the professionals of our different organisations spend so little time together.
 
Of course, I also now appreciate this phase of the project is going to take somewhat longer than I had expected. This team need space to catch up, share news and talk through that professional stuff that affects them all but also affects them differently. And what about those bits where they feel the need to challenge each other’s thinking?

You can see the bond that exists between them all, that passion to do right by their patient in the best way they can. I am now rethinking the next phase of my project timeline, because with a bit more time together I think we could be on to something great!