7th March 2024
Simon Wickham, Transformation Consultant Analyst
In this article, Simon has kindly brought to life what it is like to work at the TU as a Transformation Consultant Analyst. We are a busy team of professionals working in partnership with our clients, ultimately wanting to deliver the needs of the clients that are typically driven by the desire to improve health and care outcomes for the populations that they serve.
Simon talks about some of the support we have in place to ensure that as a people focused organisation, we help our staff to stay well both mentally and physically, balance their work and home life, whilst at the same time deliver successful work to our clients.
A week in the life of a Transformation Consultant Analyst
Simon Wickham, Transformation Consultant Analyst
I joined the Transformation Unit at the start of 2023, as the next step along my NHS journey. I have worked in the NHS since 2016, starting in an acute provider working on improvement projects, before moving into NHS Quality Improvement in 2018.
Since joining the TU I have been a part of a wide variety of projects including modelling workforce demands for 5 year plans in Birmingham and Solihull, investigating the current estates cost demands in Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent and exploring the current capability of Cancer Alliances to identify any shared areas of benefit.
I also have internal responsibilities that run alongside my project delivery. I am a member of the Health and Wellbeing internal group which has supported me to become a Mental Health First Aider. I also support the development of the TU team by arranging internal training sessions. Our TU Techniques allows members of the team with a specific skill or experience to share what they have learnt and their approach to certain situations.
A typical week for Simon
Monday
- I start my week at around 8:00, checking any email updates from over the weekend and updating my weekly to do list. I keep a few rolling items on there to look at during rainy days but generally have something new to look forward to in the week ahead.
- From 9:30 to midday I have internal meetings. I meet with my fellow analysts and check in on workloads over the week, taking the opportunity to ask for help/offer assistance to others. There is also the standard TU Monday check-in, where someone will share a story that will get me smiling and gives me a wellness boost at the start of the week. The last meeting I have is with the Health and Wellbeing group (HWB) where we discussed the plan for the HWB themed Whole Team Day.
- I try and get moving at lunch so I took my dog out for a walk in the winter sun.
- After lunch I spent my afternoon coding in a new language for some public facing external pieces to promote the skills we have within the team. The code will process and visualise the Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC) data, a publicly available data source.
- I turn my computer off at 16:30 so I can enjoy some family time and get dinner ready.
Tuesday
- I started working at 7:45 today and jumped straight into validating and cleansing data sources that I will use to produce a dashboard for one of our clients. This involves a unification of the data into a single format, which can be a challenging processing with data from multiple sources.
- I had a meeting with a stakeholder to discuss the data they had provided and exploring gaps. Actions from this allowed me to update the data provided and share a version for the client to sign off as an accurate representation.
- The bi-weekly BD huddle was on today so I attended that. This is an internal meeting where the team has the chance to get sight on what projects are on the near horizon and how we are working toward the year target.
- I finished at bang on 16:00 to do the child care run and get started on dinner.
Wednesday
- The childcare drop off was a bit more problematic this morning so couldn’t start until almost 8:30. Having that flexibility at the TU is definitely a benefit with a young child.
- I had a dashboard day today, working on a project dashboard visualising a multitude of metrics as well a separate dashboard for the TU website as a general Population Health summary using publicly available data. A lot of time goes into finetuning the visuals and the making sure the data is in an accessible format.
- I managed to get out for a walk with my dog at lunch to the local park today, despite intermittent showers.
Thursday
- I have a major steering group meeting to prepare for this afternoon so my morning was spent checking data, finalising slides and preparing my points to discuss.
- I had a couple of calls from members of the team asking for some data advice and help organizing spreadsheets, which were welcome distractions from the focused project work.
- Following the steering group meeting, I took some time to reflect on how I approached the meeting, what I presented and could I have done it better. There was a question I wasn’t prepared for so made a note to add it to my prepping notes for future meetings.
Friday
- Drop off was good this morning so started work at 8:10. Had a lot of emails to catch up on following the steering group, generally data updates following discussions of the draft baseline. It was good to have proactive follow up from the meeting.
- Between 8:30 and 10:00 I spent time updating the project dashboard with the new data submissions and sent a draft out for review.
- From 10:00 onwards I turned to my internal responsibilities and started the process of collecting and ordering the TU data ready for our Whole Team Meeting.
- At 15:30 I updated my timesheets for the week and reflected on what I had done with my time. I was proud with how the steering group meeting went on Thursday and the progress I have made to understanding a new programming language.
For more information on the NHS Transformation Unit
W: https://transformationunit.nhs.uk/