What does a soap factory, a hotel laundry, a cheese processing plant and a builder’s merchant have in common? They were all places that I learnt my ‘trade’, and somehow I became a CIO in the health service!
Yesterday was a great day for the digital team in Leeds, for the second year running the team interviewed for student placements for the summer. Six bright young things part way through their education in all things digital science came to meet the team and to work with us to decide if the digital team in Leeds is the right place to come and trial the skills they have been learning all year.
So over the next couple of weeks we will welcome; Daniel, Daniel, George, George, Alice and Reece to the team. A gang of Computer Sciences students who have a passion to do something good with their newly developed knowledge, to quench their thirst to try what they know in the ‘real world’! The exceptional thing that made me jump for joy though is that these 25ish year olds all wanted to be in Leeds for one key reason; they wanted to do good with the knowledge they have learned, they wanted to give back, the wanted to deliver return on the reputation that Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust has built.
So much is written about the lack of faith that our future stars will have in the organisations they choose to work for and yet here I was faced with six stars of the future, all six of them looked ready to burst with enthusiasm. We delivered a presentation to them first, a bit of who we are and what we do, then another super star, Gareth Edwards one of our informatics nurses showed them what working here was going to be like. One of those age defining moments happened though as our amazing Informatics Nurse used a screen image of a computer game form the 80s and a computer game from now to show the difference in expectation that digital consumers have now. One of our candidates exclaimed; ‘My Dad used to play that game’, the sadness with a wry grin that swept over all of us in the room had to be seen to be believed as we realised just how fresh and ready for the challenge these new guys were going to be! But poor Gareth.
Much has been made of the Leeds Way, Davina Mcall has even explained it to Phil and Holly! When you see the Leeds Way ‘infecting’ new people into the organisation though is when you realise how well as a trust we have built this culture. After three hours with the team, in an assessment type scenario these guys were smiling, laughing and most importantly of all making amazing suggestions that we simply had not thought of. The assessment was a paper based affair, ‘think through how you would build the patient consent for surgery form?’ Remove the paper from the equation.
Now, lets just jump back a moment these are six students with no healthcare experience, the ideas they came up with, the references they were able to make to how people use technology, the way they really were appreciating the difference between digital transformation and IT really, truly blew my mind.
Thinking about colours, size of font, language, sensitivity about information recording, data protection, data ownership, access controls, the physicality of kit, the nature of the form; and most importantly the human nature of what was being considered. All came up in a 30 minute paired task!
So, we now have six new inductees into what we are and what we do; my promise is that their ‘summer job’ will not be like mine was; I won’t simply leave them to do the rubbish jobs, I will try to inspire them, I will try to send them back to their next year with a story to tell and if I can help influence a tiny little bit of the next generation of people who do what we do then crikey I am going to love this summer!
The #LeedsDigitalWay just started to create its next generation.