Ever wondered a little more about the people behind Care City? A small team, but with bags and bags of experience, some perhaps more unexpected than others. Learn a little more about Care City’s very own Quality Improvement Lead, Dean Rigg – also a Paramedic!

I love the people I get to meet; I love the things that I learn; I love the difference that I get to make; I love being able to help people through some of the scariest and most traumatic life events that they will face. There’s no other job in health or social care where you have the honour of delivering somebody’s first child on their kitchen floor, of taking away somebody’s worst ever pain while travelling at 70 miles an hour or help somebody manage the passing of their partner of 60 years, all in one day! II love being a paramedic.

I started my paramedic training as a naïve 18 year old and very quickly had my eyes opened. Health and social care services had massive challenges, there were areas that we could improve and while I would always do the best that I could for my patients, sometimes I was limited by the system and I couldn’t do enough. As the years progressed, I realised that I had no power to solve these problems but I knew that, given the opportunity, I could make a difference and so I started to look out of my silo. There were very few opportunities for paramedics outside of the traditional ambulance setting at the time, so it wasn’t easy, but I found my chance to make a difference in the form of the NHS 111 service.

The concept of the NHS 111 service was new and exciting. It seemed like an excellent way to take healthcare to the patient and to reduce some of the demand on 999 services. It was hard work and it wasn’t a smooth journey, but we got there. We managed to design and launch a successful telephone triage service from scratch. Again, there were challenges and things that I didn’t have the power to change, but for the first time I could use my skills, knowledge and creativity to help develop our systems, my colleagues and improve the service that we provided to the people of Yorkshire and the Humber. This later led to a role with NHS Digital, where I could make a difference on a bigger scale. My proudest piece of work with NHS Digital was a project that involved reducing the time taken to instruct callers to start chest compressions when calling 999 for patients who were in cardiac arrest. Reducing the time to start chest compressions increases the chances of patient survival. Having seen the devastating effects that sudden cardiac arrest can have on friends and family, this was a piece of work that I had a close personal connection to.

I love Yorkshire and its people and I felt like an adopted Yorkshire man after 10 years there, but I also love London and I’d always wanted to have a go at living in the city. So, when I was offered a place on the prestigious Darzi Fellowship, I jumped at the chance. I packed my rural, four-bed home into storage and moved south into a modest room in a four-bed house share. It was quite a culture shock! The Darzi Fellowship taught me so much about myself, about our health service, about how to make change in our health service. Of course, it’s still a tough industry to work in, but now I feel much better prepared to deal with the complexity.

Coming to the end of my Darzi Fellowship was a scary time. I’d moved to London, left a stable job and left behind my home and friends and now I needed to find something else. Fortunately for me, Care City was seeking somebody to lead their Quality Improvement programme. The role was everything I was looking for; not only am I supporting colleagues to make improvements in specific areas of health and social care, but also spreading the skills required for colleagues to lead their own changes. One of the beauties of this programme is that we’re bringing together a whole spectrum of colleagues from both health and social care to learn together and to learn from each other. Colleagues can understand the problems the other parts of health and social care are facing and offer practical ideas for change, within a structured improvement framework. I love our health and social care services. We do amazing things for people every day and it is important that we care for it to ensure its sustainability. I feel that Care City will play a big part in ensuring the sustainability of health and care services across north east London.

I am in a great place now, where I can spend time helping people to reflect upon and improve the quality of the care that they provide and spend time working clinically doing the role that I love with a local ambulance service. I am keen to explore any opportunities to support health and social care services with their quality improvement endeavours and support as many people as possible to develop quality improvement skills. So please, if you’d like to discuss this further, please get in touch or book on to one of our courses and we’ll have a chat there.