Weeknotes 2023-04-24

Hope

Last week I wrote about the disappointment of not managing to convert energy and activity immediately into the easier week I'd subconsciously promised myself. This week, while it wasn't the mythical "easy week", some of the hope returned.

Team as a team times two

The first (and probably biggest) reason for hopefulness was a really good team meeting at the start of the week. At times our team have needed to be too reactive, and have not been able to give each other enough of ourselves, but this week saw some productive and collaborative discussion. I have not idea if they read this, but if you do, thank you for your approach this week!

We also by happenstance all ended up in the same hospital on Thursday as a division GM team. After dialling in to our weekly meeting as usual on teams, we recongised the opportunity and instead assembled in an office for the first time face to face. Really good to be together.

Mentoring

I met a mentee for the first time, and I'm really looking forward to working with them, while they discover the depth and interest that can exist in analytics in the NHS. I'm really looking forward to seeing our team and organisation through fresh eyes, as well as getting a better understanding of what tools an analyst apprentice learns (spoiler alert - python and R, but not much SQL so far).

Prep for NUH analytics conference

Had a really good informal prep meeting with Jurgen to check how our conference talks fit together. There's so much opportunity for analytics at NUH, and it's exciting to be helping to shape it. #publicmoneypubliccode

Answering important questions

I joined the performance meeting for our division, and saw first hand the process of discussion that a lot of my team's work feeds into. It has taken longer than it should to start joining this level of meeting, but that has been necessary while focussing on lower level but more urgent fixes. I was encouraged with the nature of the discussion, but there is more work to do to line the commentary up fully with the detail of what data and information are telling us. The good news is that a lot of the hard work (the data and visualisation prep) is already done.

Next week should be a good one, with the highlight being the first NUH internal analytics conference, bringing analysts together from all over the organisation into a single place, for what is likely to be the first time in well over 3 years, if not a lot longer!

Good weekend until then!