Weeknotes 2023-03-27

This has been a busy week on the run-in to month-end, combined with some holiday for me next week, and for others in the team a week later (it's half term).

FH Insight Strategy

Started the week presenting my information/insight team strategy to the Family Health division's board meeting. This resulted in some good discussion around how much there is to do, but positively, it's the first time in a long time that our division's information team has had airtime in that senior forum.

Subsequent conversations with my boss(es) were encouraging too, and I'm sure we're on the right track. There is a lot of work to do, and doing the right work is important. I need to keep working on and building those relationships and opportunities for feedback.

Bed reporting

The team finalised a draft of some new cross-division bed-occupancy reporting, ready for sharing with stakeholders. That will happen in a couple of weeks, but this week we had a driving lesson with python, using a package that another team have developed to abstract the process of pulling data. I also did some informal training with a team member on the power of functions in R, and how we can purrr:::map(lots_of_areas, do_a_really_useful_thing). Lots more to come in this area, and the bed report is the first in a new series.

Definitions alignment

Held a productive meeting with some maternity stakeholders, to plan how we can jointly create a metric set with better definition transparency. My team have made a lot of progress over the last 2 years, and we have indexed approx 300 maternity metrics. The audit team are tracking a large amount of detail too. We drew up a plan for how we can join and summarise our definitions in a single document, to arrive at a common definition set. I'm constantly surprised by how much variation there is in maternity definitions nationally (given that giving birth is not a new process!). Despite that, over the next 3 months we will have a locally consistent set of definitions, and will be busy documenting and implementing them.

End

I need to think about the structure of these posts for future weeks, but that's it for this week!