Our Project Lead, Mez Jardiel, also joined the Nightingale team on secondment as a Bedside Learning Coordinator, capturing frontline insights on improving patient care, efficiency and staff wellbeing. Her top three learnings based on her experience:

Listen to the patients – I can’t think of a better way of ensuring that we are delivering patient-centered care than listening to our patients and co-designing ways on how we can make their stay more comfortable, especially since they are unable to be with their loved ones during the pandemic.

#OneTeam – If there was one thing that this pandemic has highlighted to us, teamwork does make the dream work! The NHS is filled with people that are passionate in delivering patient-centered care, and regardless of your named role, you have the ability to make a difference in patient care and wellbeing.

The power of staff autonomy – At the Nightingale, when we say we’re working on this together, we mean it in the literal sense. Senior leaders and their deputies are very supportive, approachable and available all the time to work with you. It’s great as in most cases, having senior leadership support and sign-off helps embed changes more effectively. The freedom from the usual NHS bureaucracy also meant that we were able to solve things quickly and focus more on patient care – Problem seen, solution developed and implemented. It was very rewarding to see changes implemented in such a short amount of time, especially as you can see its impact on patients and staff straightaway.

Meet Tracy Sullivan, Senior Carer – KarePlus

Tracy Sullivan likes to keep moving. She is a senior care worker in Havering, and works long shifts, five days a week. For many years she worked in a care home, but she is happier now in homecare, moving around, discovering new places. Movement has always been part of Tracy’s life, having grown up on a traveller site in Huntingdon. Single, and with her four children themselves grown up, Tracy is again more nomadic. She has moved house eight times in three years, and she knows that she won’t stop still for long.

For Tracy, the freedom to move is worth the associated moments of loneliness or invisibility. Despite moving often, Tracy always finds work. She has the right skills and stories, and a folder of purring references. Where she is now, at a franchise of Kare Plus in Havering, Tracy is a key lieutenant. She is in charge of client assessments and reviews, she trains staff and she provides support to colleagues in elements of care such as medication management.

There is a nomadic invisibility to Tracy’s professional life too, despite all her expertise. After twenty-five years working in care, Tracy has done a lot of training, but she has not a single care qualification. Tracy is well used to the lack of recognition care staff receive, but that does not stop it being a waste.

The Care City Test Bed programme enabled us to work with homecare staff and their managers to develop an enhanced service, about spotting ill-health early, and escalating only the right patients to the right clinician with the right data, using Whzan. It wasn’t easy. When we offered homecare staff the chance of a more complicated work day, some chuckled and shook their heads. Their care jobs were just one of the many things they were juggling in their lives. Some GPs were sceptical too. And when we talked about care staff escalating patients to GPs, one sighed and said, ‘ah, great, a different number to phone and not be listened to!’

However, other homecare staff leapt at the chance. Among them was Tracy Sullivan. Daunted at first, after ninety minutes of training, she started to believe that she could do it. And with Tracy’s experience, she knew the difference it might make to her service users. Tracy is now a confident Expert Carer, and during COVID-19 – with her clients struggling to access healthcare – was able to spot a client with dangerously high blood pressure, preventing them becoming seriously unwell by alerting their GP.

While that experience particularly will stay with Tracy, the biggest difference it has made for her is relational. For the first time, she has had conversations with colleagues like district nurses that felt like ‘two professionals discussing a client’. That’s after twenty five years of experience, and just ninety-minutes training.

Excerpt from A Healthy Living – Four Stories from the future of Care

Shilpi joined the Care City family in 2019 as Project Lead and since then has led on a number of diverse projects. She’s had a whirlwind year, starting it as Shilpi Begum and finishing it as Shilpi Shobowale. But more about that later. Let’s start at the beginning.

Shilpi is from a large family, growing up with seven brothers and sisters! She humbly states that she believes she was the most academic, but she’s quick to explain that does not mean she was the smartest, she just didn’t feel as creative as her siblings. Her Sister is Head of Art for a school in Hertfordshire, her brothers studied film at the University for the Creative Arts and another channels his creative brilliance into Graphic Design. Shilpi makes me chuckle as she simply states “…and me? Well I just like maths”! 

Her Mum used to say she was destined to be a Doctor and although Shilpi’s grades did not enable that she went on to study A-Level Chemistry, Biology and Maths, keen to still get a role in health. The need to repeat a year to get her grades up, gave Shilpi the wake up call she said she needed to “knuckle down and do her work”! And that is exactly what she did. 

She went on to study Biomedical Science at Coventry University and graduated with a 2:1, despite the distraction of a young man by the name of Emmanuel, who on Day One at Uni was found knocking on Halls of Residence doors, trying to find friends to go for a drink with, little knowing that nine years later, the lady behind one of the doors – our Shilpi – would turn out to be his wife! 

Shilpi loved lectures and she loved the subject matter, but realised quite early on that she could not see herself in a lab based career. “Way too isolated for me”, she claims, “I’m too much of a Chatty Patty!” (and apparently quite a distraction to her mates). Graduating in the Summer of 2015, content in the knowledge that she didn’t want to work as a Biomedical Scientist, she moved back home to St Albans back to her retail job in BHS to ponder what her next career move would be. A mate told her about a scholarship for a Masters at Coventry University and a couple of months later, she was back, studying a Masters in Health Care Management. 

Graduating a year later, she entered a frustrating period of applying for jobs, only to receive feedback that she was either overqualified or lacking in experience! However a role at Guys and St Thomas as an Associate Medical Secretary, saw her quickly progress to a Patient Pathway Coordinator, where she feels she really learnt about “the ins and outs of the NHS”, noticing flaws in systems and pathways and realising that she needed to be in a role where she could have more influence and make a bigger impact. 

A role as a Service Support Manager at Kings followed, which truly reinforced that “health is my calling”, however a daily four hour commute made the role unsustainable, so she moved to North West London CCG and “fell” into Digital Health as Programme Coordinator for the WSIC dashboard and has not looked back. 

Having had knock backs for job roles previously due to lack of experience she didn’t hold out much hope of getting on to the Digital Pioneer Fellowship as a Band 5. But Shilpi is not one to walk away from a challenge and thank goodness she didn’t as she was successful, It catapulted her confidence, helped her develop new Project Management skills and it’s what led her to us! 

Motivated by the work we had done on the Innovation Test Bed and seeing that as an opportunity to make the bigger impact that she craved, she applied for our Project Lead role. She remembers the interview and recalls it being less like a torturous grilling and more like a conversation. When she asked what the recruiting panel liked about Care City, apparently they all just looked at each other and in unison responded “the people”! Shilpi became one of “the people” and has been a whirlwind of action from Day One.

Since joining, Shilpi has led on our Apprentice Nurse Associate Programme, working with local care homes to introduce a new pathway for care staff to become Nursing Associates, our Healthy Air project, looking at how we can improve indoor air quality in the homes of our Barking and Dagenham community and works closely with our Data Analysts on using the Care City Cohort, our linked dataset, to draw insights about population health across Barking & Dagenham.

However the project she speaks of most fondly is the work that she did with Feebris, introducing remote monitoring into care homes across East London. And it was the Feebris team that Shilpi says really made it an enjoyable experience.

When asked if she thinks she’s making the impact she yearns to, a wry smile appears as she talks about how she’s reflected on this during the “lockdown years”. “I wondered how I could possibly make a difference working from my bedroom, but when you realise that from your laptop and phone you can direct remote monitoring to happen over here, analytical work to happen over there, then yes, I’m making an impact” 

And she’s made a huge impact on the team – not just her dedication and tenacity to lead on these diverse projects, but a baking brilliance, grabbing joint first prize with Ben Williams on the Care City Bake Off challenge for her rainbow cake and winning hands down (or feet down) the Care City Step Challenge, with many of us wondering how it’s possible to walk 20,000 steps before breakfast! 

When asked what the future holds, she reveals with pride that she has been contacted by Digital Health London to be part of the interviewing and recruitment panel for it’s Accelerator Programme, helping to recruit digital talent and speed up adoption of their digital health innovations in the NHS. We’re very proud too. It turns out that this girl that “likes maths” is actually better at so much more!

The beginning of 2021 saw Hannah Harniess our Deputy Chief Exective seconded to the Senior Clinical Leadership Team at Nightingale Hospital London. You can read her story here…

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us all to rapidly learn and to rethink how we interact with and deliver health and care services. In January 2021, as the pressures on London hospitals once again escalated,  I was seconded to NELFT as part of the senior clinical leadership team tasked with establishing a second Nightingale Hospital London (NHL2).

It was one of my most challenging, exhausting and rewarding roles. However, my story isn’t remarkable or unique. There are a million stories of people stretched beyond their role, who’ve supported people with Covid-19 at their most vulnerable, going above and beyond to try to keep families connected to their loved ones.

Many of the workforce have not only had to rapidly learn about this novel virus, but also learn about how to work in different environments, with different colleagues within a rapidly transformed work environment where loss and grief have featured so significantly. Although we faced significant population health challenges ‘pre-Covid’ we often still worked as if the privilege of time was available to us, tinkering with ‘disruption’ and ‘innovation’ around the edges.  The pandemic has revealed what true disruption is, leading to a remarkable transformation of a traditionally immobile and inflexible healthcare system, with many of the familiar and entrenched barriers to change lifted almost overnight.

Part of my role at NHL2 was to capture learning from the field hospital, through interviews, observation and a workforce census. This led to a number of important learning points which have application across the system and also intersect with much of our work and mission at Care City

New ways of working – multi-professional working and enhanced roles:

A system which has traditionally held fast to hierarchy and siloed clinical boundaries had to allow some blurring of these boundaries. Rather than disaster, this showed us the potential of our workforce to rapidly learn and work beyond normal role scopes.

At NHL2, flexible multi-disciplinary team (MDT) working was critical, enabling  emergent and informal learning, with many staff reporting that they had gained new skills from observing and working with others who they would not normally interact with. Clinical leads were able to support inexperienced staff and enable staff to work outside of their ‘normal’ skill set, boosting confidence and skills development.

New pathways into health and care careers:

The NHL2 was situated in an area of east London described as the ‘deadly Covid-19 triangle’ because of its high levels of deprivation and some of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection. The devastating economic and human cost of the pandemic on this region will ripple for some time. Significant unemployment rates are set to increase further as a result of Covid-19, presenting further risks to our community’s health and wellbeing. Alongside this, the local health and social care system faces substantial workforce shortages.

The NHL offered temporary economic support, through employment, to people for whom Covid-19 had decimated their normal industry (e.g. hospitality, leisure, retail or creative arts) and presented an opportunity for those who would not normally consider a career in health or social care to gain exposure to this sector. A third of the workforce joined from other industries, a fifth had no previous experience of health and social care and 14% of the NHL2 workforce were recruited after being out of employment or education, some for more than 6 months.The NHS brand coupled with a clear vision to make a difference to the population, was influential in attracting people from outside of the normal labour pool and more than half of those without previous sector experience wanted to remain in health and care beyond Nightingale.

As the Anchor Institution agenda continues to develop, we need to capitalise on increased interest in the sector and ensure this creates and grows non-traditional pathways and routes to work, supported by access to quality work experience and new training models.

Collaborative leadership:

Collaborative leadership emerged as a key enabler of the ethos of NHL2 and something different to ‘normal’ practice. Staff consistently spoke of the visibility and accessibility of NHL leadership. There was active encouragement of staff involvement in decision making, and open stand-up meetings in shared spaces and in clinical spaces created a sense of inclusion and collaboration.

In a crisis, leaders often revert to command and control strategies in an attempt to manage uncertainties. This can stifle creativity and suppress diversity of thinking. The experience at NHL and in other parts of the system demonstrated that a different model works, even under pressure. Visible, empathetic and accessible leaders who recognised their own knowledge gaps and trusted those on the frontline to lead, both empowered staff and created an environment for better decision making.

 Rapid decision making:

The benefit of a rapidly established organisation included less layers of hierarchy, complex process, or governance to wade through, enabling change to happen much faster. Staff were actively encouraged to try new things, work autonomously and make decisions. Before the pandemic, decisions often required multiple levels of approval, Covid-19 meant that these lengthy processes could not be afforded. The default setting leaned towards ‘yes’ with a higher bar for ‘no’. Despite the intense pressure, trust in staff to make decisions, demonstrated through the permission to work differently, also served to boost confidence and support staff wellbeing.

 Removing barriers to uptake of technology and innovation

Covid-19, while hugely challenging, has created a natural experiment for new ways of working across health and care. Previously immutable barriers to innovation were remarkably dismantled and transformation in delivery of care happened simultaneously across the system. We have seen that technology can be scaled at an incredible pace when staff are empowered to lead change. For example, 60% of UK adults now report using technology to engage with the health service for the first time, or more than before. More than 90% of primary care consultations rapidly moved on-line in the first few months of the pandemic. This showed us what is possible in relation to rapid uptake of technology when there is concerted effort and investment in infrastructure and tools to enable this.

Although my work at NHL revealed a number of important lessons – these also come with some caveats. We know that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced the significant inequalities across the UK.  Own local analysis at Care City shows that black residents in Barking and Dagenham suffer the effects of long-term disease almost a decade earlier than their white counterparts.  Although technology has solved challenges for many people, the pandemic has also intensified the digital divide and this is an issue that must be urgently addressed if we are to avoid reinforcing health and social inequalities in our ‘post-Covid’ health and care system. Organisations such as the Good Things Foundation have called for a new manifesto for digital inclusion as we recover from this period.

To address the huge population challenges of the next few years, an integrated approach to health and social care careers is essential to ensure that the pipeline is not skewed towards health opportunities at the cost of care. The NELHCP Careers Programme which Care City is currently supporting is unique in this integrated approach and we will continue to work across the ICS to promote the sector and support and develop new career pathways. However, while we are developing exciting new pathways and routes into health and social care, we also need to recognise the weariness of our current workforce. After leaving the NHL I was exhausted but still felt guilty for needing a break, recognising that my contribution, while intense, had been far shorter than many others. Our workforce has risen to the challenge and stepped up to new ways of working, but we risk losing experienced staff if we can’t create an environment that supports a more sustainable work-life balance as we learn to live with threats like Covid in the long term. Keeping successful leadership models from this period, investing in visible leadership across the system, and consistent modelling of trust in deputies and prioritising days off and down time is crucial. Although time feels pressured, we need to invest in genuine staff wellbeing now, more than ever before.

We innovate to create a happier, healthier older age for east Londoners, bringing people and tech together to solve tough challenges.

Our recent collaboration with Satalia is an example. The smart people at Satalia created the AI that schedules home deliveries and assistance for the likes of Tesco, BT Openreach and PWC. We’ve been excited to work with them and bring their expertise and sophisticated algorithms to healthcare.

With funding from Innovate UK, Satalia’s optimisation experts worked with us to develop an online system for automating scheduling of District Nurses (DNs) in North-East London Foundation Trust. The system aimed to:

• Match visits to the most appropriate staff based on their skills and qualifications
• Require minimal support from triage staff
• Attempt to keep continuity of care and reduce infection risks
• Give flexibility to rapidly change the size and shape of teams
• Reduce travel distance and travel time
• Reduce Carbon footprint.

NELFT are co-founders of Care City and have been hugely supportive partners to this project. However, there are important organisational reasons for NELFT’s interest – efficiency, but also the prospect of using smarter scheduling to reduce infection risk through better ‘bubbling’ of staff and patients, in part in response to Covid.

Thanks to an incredible team of DNs who have patiently explained how their work is scheduled, Satalia tested a prototype in July. And we are delighted to say it worked! We succeeded in incorporating the triage nurse’s knowledge and automating 100% of the scheduled visits of a team of nurses within two weeks. 

But what does this actually mean? What are the measurable benefits and is this something that could bring benefits more widely than our local District Nurse team?

Yes – we’ve proved we can save a massive amount of coordination time. Scheduling an eight person DN team is a full-time job, and there is so much more that these experienced staff could be doing.

We’ve also managed to reduce the average travel time of these District Nurses by 12.9% and their average travel distance by 12.7%. Outside of London, we think we could save a greater percentage, and the distances involved would be much larger.

And thinking beyond just efficiency, we believe that bringing cutting edge logistics to District Nursing can enhance integrated care. Until now, thinking about how tasks might be passed between community, primary and social care – in real-time – was simply too complicated. However, enabling this kind of delegation is within sight. Great scheduling can make care not just more efficient but more effective.

#DigitalCHS

As a Community Interest Company, our North East London community is at the heart of everything we do and we need a smart, committed team to ensure that we listen to them, learn from them and support them effectively. We’re very proud of the culture we have created amongst the team. We may be a small team here at Care City, but our experiences, expertise and ambitions are really quite diverse – and the one thing we all have in common is a desire to develop ourselves and support others to do the same.

In the last couple of months alone team members have started an Apprenticeship, received a well earned promotion and been accepted onto a University degree. Over the next few weeks we’ll introduce you to the talented individuals that make up our happy Care City team. Julie Atkins, our Project Lead starts us off…

Cartoonist, saxophonist, executive coach and clown. What do all these things have in common? Julie Atkins, who at 61 believes you are never too old to start learning new stuff!

Julie joined the Care City team two and half years ago and has been working part time with us as a Project Lead, alongside managing a part time role at NELFT as a Self Care Facilitator. In fact it’s probably unfair to “label” Julie as a Project Lead, as although she is very busy managing our frailty research and enablement champion projects, there are many other strings to her bow, including Chair of our Community Board, heading up our co-design work and facilitating virtual intergenerational coffee mornings on behalf of the Downshall Intergenerational Group.

But when retirement would have been on the horizon for many, Julie has just enrolled on an 18 month Improvement Leadership Apprenticeship with NELFT and is excited about the prospect of developing her Quality Improvement knowledge and being able to share her learnings across Care City. 

When asked why she wanted to delay her retirement and embark on an apprenticeship after 43 years working full time, her answer is very simple “I absolutely love quality improvement having been involved with QI in NELFT. I’m interested in how you support change and ensuring everyone’s voices are heard. I just LOVE learning”. This is unsurprising, as Julie regularly regales us with her latest hobbies, which have seen her performing as a clown at Jackson Lane Community Centre in Highgate and could soon see her entertaining her local Ramsgate audience with her new saxophony skills!

Julie is keen to apply her apprenticeships learning and QI training skills to our Project Management methods. As Julie states quite beautifully “We need to be very clear as to the actions we take within our projects and ensure a methodical approach to managing projects. There is still more we can do to improve our organisational processes and work without taking away our love and laughter”

Julie has a history of putting what she has learnt into practice. Running the NELFT Expert Patients Programme, a course for people with long term health conditions to teach them skills to become better self managers has stood her in good stead for co producing the Self Management Training programme for HCA’s, commissioned by UCLPartners.

So what is Julie’s secret to squeezing so much into her day? Well Julie has been making the most of her time working from home during the pandemic. She no longer has a three hour daily commute to the city, so uses that time to ensure she balances both work life and personal interests, although she is keen to point out that whilst she no longer has to walk to the train station to start her journey to work, she does still rise at 5:30 and takes a long walk along Ramsgate seafront to start her day, to breathe in fresh air and start her day with a smile. The sea air is obviously very good for you Julie!

Meet Ajeesh Thomas, Senior Care Coordinator – Ebury Court Care Home

As a boy in India, Ajeesh Thomas wanted to be a teacher. In 2005, he was 23, a qualified accountant, with a lucrative career ahead of him. However, that year he felt deeply that something was missing. He came to London in search of a new life and answered a profound sense of vocation to work in care. Ajeesh found a job at Ebury Court care home in Rush Green in Havering, where he has worked ever since, committing himself to improving the well-being of its residents.

As he has worked with his colleagues to improve the care home, so he has thrown himself into self-improvement. He has earned a Level 3 diploma in palliative care, one at Level 4 in health and social care and a Level 5 Diploma in leadership and management. Today, Ajeesh has a huge range of responsibilities in the care home, and he has become the teacher that he wanted to be as a boy. He trains, coaches and supports staff across the home. Like all the best teachers, he remains an avid learner, liaising closely with district nurses, GPs and listening acutely to what they say. He loves to learn about the health of his residents, but over time, that learning has brought frustration. Ajeesh could see how the excellent care they received could be even better.

As for so many care staff, 2020 was a gruelling year for Ajeesh. He lived apart from his own family – even as they coped with sickness – thinking constantly of both of them and of his residents. If his mind was not made up already, COVID-19 made him certain – Ajeesh wanted to be a clinician. However, he is hugely committed to Ebury Court, where he has worked and flourished for so many years. This was the dilemma facing him – choose between your residents and colleagues in the care home and an apprenticeship at the local hospital.

Thanks to the Apprentice Nurse Associate Programme, Ajeesh has been able to do both – to become an Apprentice Nursing Associate without leaving Ebury Court.

Excerpt from A Healthy Living – Four Stories from the future of Care

Laura Gillett, the first face you meet at Care City.. well at least she was in the “Before Times” as Ben Williams calls the days when Covid was unheard of and “is that a residual hand?” was not a phrase we used daily. As Care City shut its doors and working from home began, discussions took place as to how we could make best use of Laura’s skill set, given that naturally we no longer needed a Receptionist. A true collaborator, with great relationships with our partners, attention to detail and determination for self improvement, she was the perfect candidate to join our Project Support Team. Described as “the glue” for our NELHCP Careers project, she holds the project team and the project together, but little did we know she harboured a burning ambition…to be a Forensic Scientist. So exactly how did this career aspiration begin…?

Born in Redbridge, raised in Dagenham, Laura is our East London girl. When she was little she dreamt of being a Make Up Artist, a Dog Groomer and a Hairdresser. But studying Science at Jo Richardson Community School, Laura developed a real interest in Forensic Science. Believing this to be an unrealistic pursuit however, she completed a NVQ Level 2 qualification in Hairdressing at Redbridge College. She hated it! And although she is still happy to cut her family’s hair, she draws the line cutting hair for anyone else “incase I ruin their hair” she quotes!

Then followed five years working as a Customer Service Assistant at Asda, before commencing a Business Administration Apprenticeship for LBBD working within their Electoral Services Department – something she did love (and continues to support the administration of Polling Day). However a year later, when searching for a healthcare role in the NHS, she came across our Care City job advert and a new chapter began.

Laura is the first to admit that with Care City her confidence has grown and grown. And it’s this new found confidence that with Care City’s help, has seen her be accepted to London Metropolitan University to study a BSc in Forensic Science. 

“I’ve always been interested in crime dramas having grown up watching The Bill and CSI, but didn’t have the resources to pursue my dreams. But being part of the team at Care City, developing new relationships, being pushed to develop my skills and learn from others has helped build my confidence and I’ve realised this is the time to go for it. Care City not only supported my request to work part-time to enable me to study, they helped and coached me through the application process and celebrated with me when I received the offer letter. 

It’s a six year course, but Laura’s plans don’t stop there. After graduation she is hoping to do a Masters in either Toxicology or Crime Scene Investigation. “Or I may do both” she says!

There is no holding Laura back now. In fact in truth, there never has been. A county pool player for Essex, she is also ranked number 106 in World Women’s snooker. Stephen Hendry even recorded her 27th birthday celebration video message.

However she is ranked number one in Jessie’s eyes, Laura’s beloved collie – and we’re pretty sure the feeling is mutual

Continuing our “Meet the Team” series – it’s the turn of Mary France Jardiel AKA Mez.

Mez – our self confessed ‘nerd’, super organiser, IG expert, social prescribing champ, fancy stationery loving, dog Mum! Mez joined Care City on the Skills for Care graduate programme and when you dig a little deeper, a role in health and social care appears to be her destiny.

Mez’s mum and grandparents were teachers in the Philippines where Mez was born. Majority of her godparents are all teachers, so Mez fondly recalls a childhood surrounded by teachers and students who had the pleasure of either answering or dodging the countless ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions she seemed to ask endlessly. That is until the STEM classes end, and a history lesson begins – she’s usually seen bolting out the door ready to cause mischief elsewhere! Her interest in learning has been supported by her family since Day 1 and as a result, she skipped a year at a private school and advanced quicker through her studies than many of her peers.  

Mez and her family arrived in England in 2009. At the age of 13, Mez experienced quite a culture shock, having been a city girl growing up in Manila, to finding herself in Stowmarket in Suffolk, asking why shops shut at 5pm! Her mum who would have had to re-qualify to continue her teaching journey, became a senior nursing assistant in a Care Home where she worked alongside Mez’s dad and aunt. Mez’s sister and cousin have since become nurses, so it’s unsurprising to hear that Mez followed the family movement and landed her first ever job working in the Care Home, holding roles including Receptionist, Administrator and Kitchen Assistant. In fact, Mez says it is easier to list the roles she hasn’t held in the Care Home – Carer and Maintenance – the latter due to the fact she is lousy with anything that involves using a ladder, “which is almost everything given my height”! 

However, the bright lights of the city were calling her and the first chance she could, she got her driving licence, bought a car, “found her freedom” and moved to London to start her uni life at Queen Mary, University of London. 

Mez graduated with First Class Honours in Biomedical Science, then returned to Stowmarket to continue her work in the care home while she figured out what to do next. She always knew she wanted to work in the health and social care sector, believing it to be “in her blood”. However, as a young adult and with limited access to good careers advice she thought the only jobs available in the sector were Doctors and Nurses (something our work on the NELHCP Careers project is trying to fix!). She claims that if you’d told her 15-year-old self that she’d be a Project Lead, working for a Community Interest Company, doing meaningful work to support improvements to the care sector, whilst not actually delivering front line care, her response would be “are you mad?” But here we are today – a successful Project Lead, working for a Community Interest Company, doing meaningful work to support improvements to the care sector, whilst not actually delivering front line care!  

Mez’s S4C placement started with us in January 2018. She recalls her first project being our work alongside HealthUnlocked rolling out social prescribing across Barking and Redbridge. She’s a strong believer in embracing holistic care rather than just a reliance on medical intervention so this project was perfect for her. She reflects fondly on her role in the project, which started as part of the NHS/OLS Innovation Test Bed, and how she subsequently helped to oversee its expansion and adoption further across LBBD. Following her successful placement, we decided we simply had to keep her and she’s been part of the furniture ever since. In fact, talking of furniture, Mez is quite the interior designer. I remember one very animated, deep discussion about the merits of egg-chairs and the feng shui benefits it would bring to her bedroom! 

One role Mez certainly didn’t expect to find herself in was as our Information Governance expert. But as she says, “I am a nerd, I love learning new stuff and being organised (and organising others)” so she happily slipped into the role. She’s self-taught, researching the IG requirements and rules to follow and is quick to commend the team for the massive support it’s given her – this is partly because we’re relieved we don’t have to do it!  

And then the pandemic hit. Many of Mez’s projects were paused as stakeholders were redeployed and Mez found herself desperate to get on the frontline and support alongside them. Speaking to Hannah, our Deputy CEO, they identified an opportunity for Mez to train as a vaccinator and then promptly, following her own secondment to the Nightingale, Hannah identified an opportunity for Mez to join her as a Bedside Learning Coordinator reporting into the Quality Improvement team. As Mez says, her only experience of working life up until this point was Care City, so the BLC role gave her a welcome opportunity to experience working in a hospital alongside new teams and having new work experiences and challenges. 

Mez is now back project managing our Living With Long Covid project alongside UCLPartners and supporting the AF pathway roll out across BHR. Much of this done from her home in Colchester, surrounded by the loves of her life, Nala (CockerJack), Rocco (technically a Labrador, but is built like a horse), Theo (Cocker Spaniel) and Zooty the cat! The second love of her life is fancy stationery. The rest of the team are always so jealous of the pens and colourful notebooks that decorate Mez’s desk! 

So, as we look to the future for Mez and she talks about her ambition to continue to lead projects that improve population health, many of us wouldn’t be surprised to see her running a kennel (in fact she has discussed owning a farm with her BFF surrounded by alpacas) or owning a franchise of Paperchase. As long as it satisfies her self-confessed nerdy streak!