Models and Metrics

One of my current tasks is to write a strategy for data quality across our Trust. I’m needing to find out a lot about it and have been reading around the subject a fair bit to get some background information together.

One of the things I came across today was The Model Hospital. Its a digital information platform that helps with productivity, quality and efficiency. You can use it to benchmark against other NHS Trusts on all manner of things. It’s got some key metrics that trigger notification where there has been new information added. It churns out some fab looking charts. I might be spending a while rummaging around this gathering data.

I am a bit of a data nerd and love a good spreadsheet or set of facts to chew through.

Recording multiple metrics shows whether our processes are good enough for our service users and plots us against our peers and across the whole NHS Acute Trust sector.

This will be handy in identifying what is system related, operational or corruption data from elsewhere.

I can feel my nerdity peaking. I shall spend the day tomorrow fully immersed.

And to go with it, a special delivery arrived today from a #bellringing friend as a thank you gift, which I’m absolutely loving 👇

Wonder what else we could measure and benchmark in our everyday lives?

Reasons to celebrate

The 1st of December. The start of the build up to Christmas. The first day you can legitimately have chocolate for breakfast from your advent calendar.

For the last few years I’ve bought C a beer advent calendar from Adnams, our favourite purveyors of beer. However, this year they weren’t offering one, presumably as a bi product of covid shutdowns they’ve not been able to brew the volumes of beer as they had done.

Not to be out manoeuvred though I found an alternative supplier offering an advent calendar of craft beers from different establishments. Order duly placed.

On the route out of the checking out procedure I was directed to the “customers who bought this product also bought …” section. Apparently someone had bought a prosecco advent calendar. I never knew there was such a thing. Click, I’ll have one of those too.

For some reason or another an advent calendar is the one thing that C has never bought for me. We’ve bought them for R and her various flatmates over the years, and I’ve always bought him one, either chocolate or more recently beer. But for some unknown reason I’ve never been given an advent calendar.

This year he even bought himself a tea advent calendar. I don’t drink the stuff, so it was definitely a self purchase.

Well, I’ve treated myself this year seen as though no-one is going to do it for me. I know, sob story isn’t it? First world problems.

It seems fortuitous therefore that on the first day of opening my prosecco calendar, that I actually have something to celebrate. I was interviewed for a project manager 6 month secondment role, at a higher banding, and was successfully appointed, and asked to start next week.

I shall crack open that first bottle tonight and toast a new future.

Weigh in

I’ve been trying to follow a certain weight loss programme for some time now. After an initial loss of half a stone I just seemed to hover around the same area for a very long time.

This meant that psychologically I felt that the programme wasn’t working for me, so returned to some bad eating habits. I haven’t put any more weight back on so figured that that wasn’t a contributing factor.

Recently my sister sent me a planner book from said programme that she goes to a group for, I do it on line so don’t get access to all the stuff the sell or handout at group. This has prompted me to seriously try and stick to the plan, as much as my lack of fruit eating will allow.

I have been much more conscious of tracking everything I eat, have made conscious decisions on not buying those crisps or sweets on the way passed M&S at work. Then I have written it all in the planner of an evening.

I’m even going out somewhere today that requires me to take my own lunch. It would have been far easier to grab a sandwich, bag of crisps and drink from the shops, but I’ve packed my ryvita, cheese triangles, celery, radish, cucumber and sugarsnap peas instead, with my refillable water bottle.

Weigh in day was today. An epic 4lb loss in a week. 😁 Rather chuffed at that. So, thank you to big sis for sending me the planner and prompting me to take back control.

Looking for recommendations

I’m generally a creature of habit with regard to televisual viewing. When I get home from work we watch reruns of Task Master followed by reruns of NCIS that we’ve seen several times, then reruns of Law & Order SVU. And then I’m usually asleep on the sofa.

I was given a Netflix account last Christmas and I’ve watched a few series and the odd film and generally only watch things on Netflix on a Sunday when I’m doing the ironing. The trouble is, it gives you recommendations based on your previous viewing without consideringthat you might not have actuallyenjoyed that, and you might want to trysomethingelse. I also hate spending time scrolling through options trying to find something to watch. Maybe I have a limited understanding of how it works. I’ve watched some things that a few people have recommended. I also hate it when I’ve finished watching a series and the new series hasn’t been loaded yet. I want to watch the whole thing from start to end.

What I want to watch really depends on what kind of mood I’m in but the preprogrammed recommendations don’t necessarily reflect that. I like comedy, supernatural, drama, history and occasionally anything random.

Does anyone have any other recommendations worth watching that doesn’t require ages scrolling through stuff I’m not sure of? Thank you in advance.

Thank you for the thank you.

Someone at work gave me a thank you gift yesterday morning. Another team that my boss manages is going through consultation and Wednesday was interview day for the top jobs. One of the candidates came to see me last week and asked if I could help her with some interview preparation as she’d never applied for a post this high up before. Interestingly, the post is higher banding than what I’m on.

Anyway, I spent over an hour with her last week talking about the sorts of questions she might be asked and I said that she would need to pay particular attention to management skills rather than purely technical knowledge. A role on that level is more about strategy and managing other people rather than doing the graft work and knowing all the ins and outs. Its a little bit more of understanding office politics and dealing with very senior management, liaison and so on. Stuff I have done and do do in my current role anyway, I’m just on a lower pay band, but let’s not go there.

So, having spent some time with this person, we’d talked about the sorts of questions she might be asked, and the questions she should ask back. The interview happened but she didn’t get the job.

Apparently she’d spent all night worrying about it that she’d hardly slept, she had been worrying about the minutiae of detailed technical things instead of the strategic level things, so she didn’t perform well on the day. Of course they’d asked her some technical questions but wanted to know more about her and her ability to think laterally and outside of their own current structure. Precisely some of these things we’d been over. She was disappointed but mainly with herself as she knew that she had not performed her best because she hadn’t slept. She also said that her heart wasn’t really in it because it would take her away from what she knows and felt that she applied because she was expected to.

She was profusely thankful for the time that I’d spent with her and had bought me a gift by way of thanks. I did say that I wasn’t sure I deserved it as she didn’t get the job, but she said that she was appreciative of my support nonetheless.

Thank you for thanking me 😁