It has been a month since I started my fellowship at NHS Digital. It is my first role inside a national organisation. During this moth I have been able to do one of my favourite things: be curious.
I have been given permission to explore, ask questions, visit teams and turn @NHSDigital upside down. The aim was to create connections and start building my network. But it’s easier said than done.
Working in a national organisation has brought me two new concepts, hot desking and working from home. At a first glance it looks good, but it has not been as plain sailing as I thought.
The fact that I can choose any of the@NHSDigital buildings across the UK seems amazing but I discovered that hot-desking can be very lonely.
I have been a Nurse for 20 years and during my long career I have always had a workplace, a place where I know people, a place were I belong. Now I do not any more.
Hot desks are very cold. They are impersonal. Just a table, a chair and a screen where you connect your laptop. For the first week I went to the same place and sat at the same hot-desk. Everyday I saw different people. I exchanged hellos but nothing more. I even tried to pimp my hot desk leaving my cup and a few of my pens. I was trying to mark my territory, but it didn’t work.
One day I arrived at work and someone was sitting in MY hot desk!!! A mixture of anger and amusement overcame me. It forced me to find a new hot desk! I felt violated. I decided to leave the building a find another hot desk. During the next few weeks I went on a journey trying to find the best hot desk. Now I am quite comfortable with the idea of not having a desk.
During this month I discovered also a totally new concept, working from home. It feels very weird not having to go to work. For the first two weeks even if I did not have any meetings I took the train to Leeds. I underestimated how important it was for me to go to work.
But after a couple of weeks, building some courage, I decided to enter “working from home” in my diary. Great I thought. But it went all wrong. I did not put my alarm on or prepared my clothes the night before. I woke up and made my first mistake. I decided to work in my pyjamas. I sat on my living room sofa, breakfast on one side and my laptop in front of me. I found it very difficult to concentrate or do anything. My mind was constantly distracted and could not concentrate.
After three hours I could not take it any longer. I felt an urge to leave the house. I got dressed and took the train to Leeds. I arrived at my hot desk and plugged in my laptop. A sense of relief overwhelmed me. After more than 25 years going to work I felt that working from home was cheating. I felt like I was bunking from school.
But I dd not throw in the towel. I decided to give it another go. But this time I did my routine. Set my alarm, left my clothes and backpack out ready before I went to sleep. The next day I followed my daily routine. I showered, got dressed and left home and I walked around the block and came back home and I went directly to the study and closed the door. The day went better and this time it took over four hours for the sense of guilt to come back.
This freedom is great but it takes a change of mentality to get used to it, but it comes at a price. Often you can spend entire days without human contact. The beginning is hard. You underestimate the sense of belonging or the human contact until you don’t have it. Also when you start in a new organisation, building your network from home or a hot desk is very hard. I come from being a big fish in a small pond where I used to know everyone, to be a small fish to a MASSIVE pond. I am invisible now and I am not used to it.
It has been an incredible month. A month where I’ve discovered what NHS Digital do with all the data. I spend a few days with the Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) Team. I also learned some of the amazing projects that @NHSDigital is working on like the CP-IS project, The E-Redbook or the Child Health Information System that @NHSDigital is building. I have spent a day with the NHS Pathways team looking at what goes on behind the NHS 111 and I’ve been with the E-Referals Team. I also attended some fantastic events like the E-Health week in London where I learnt what the future will look like.
Time is a strange concept. During last week I had time on my hands to meet people, go to places and explore. Coming from working at the frontline this is a luxury I am not used to it and having a gap on my diary it used to make fill me uncomfortable and that I was not being productive or working hard enough.
Time is precious.
After a month now, I have reached a critical point. I need to make decisions which team I will join and where I will be spending my time over the next 11 months. There are so many amazing projects. I want to say yes to everything, but I can only choose three.
Join me next month to discover which projects I will be working on.
(This blog is edited by @NHSdigital comms)
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Tweet with Joan Pons Laplana via @RoaringNurse ... he'd love to chat to you about #MyDigitalJourney
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