Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust

If you’re anything like me, having a break is…hard. The succession of problem-solving tasks is what I like about my day-to-day work, but I’d be lying if I didn’t occasionally come back from a break with five more things to sort and think: “what was I working on gain?”  “When you get interrupted in a task, take 20 seconds to…

A few years ago, I tried to teach my mum how to use a smartphone. What I thought would take a few minutes turned into weeks of explaining, reassuring, and troubleshooting. Every new feature seemed intimidating, and every mistake reinforced a fear that she might “break” something. At the time, I thought I was teaching…

Across the NHS, hospitals are facing increasing pressure not only from rising patient demand, but from the growing complexity of delivering safe, efficient care within constrained operational environments. Theatre capacity, staffing shortages and delayed patient flow are all placing systems under strain, where even small inefficiencies can have significant consequences.  Minutes lost during patient handovers,…

Across the UK and internationally, ambulance, police and fire services are facing increasing pressures not only from rising demand, but from a quieter and more structural issue: vehicle availability. With c.8-10% of public sector fleets off the road at any given time, a growing proportion are ageing beyond their optimal operational life, leading to more…

Reflecting on my time at Rewired, the opportunities that can be achieved by the NHS from maximising frontline productivity (FP) are increasingly clear to me. In line with the FP programme mandate, I saw a clear shift in focus from EPR roll-out to instead a wider scope which included championing digital enablement and adoption via…

Sitting at my 200-year-old desk, checking a 120-year-old pocket watch, and recapping a century-old fountain pen, while dictating this into my phone and letting AI help shape it into a blog. The irony isn’t lost on me. Just before writing this, I spoke to someone who’s spent years focused on the problem, not the solution….

Career changes are rarely about chasing a new title. For me, the move from big pharma into the public sector was about aligning my skills with work that has a more direct impact on people’s lives. For several years, I worked in the private sector supporting global clinical trials by overseeing translations of electronic clinical…

I remember the sinking feeling clearly. I was working from my home office when my builder knocked on the door and asked if he could have “a quick word.” That phrase never means good news. He’d discovered another asbestos pipe—hidden behind a wall we’d already opened up. The bathroom renovation was delayed again. Costs climbed….