Blog post #2, August 2023
It’s not often that you get a chance to work with the best. Having grown up building computers and programming games in BASIC on a BBC Micro, I press all the buttons in software to see what happens. Sometimes terrible things happen, sometimes wonderful, but each time I learn something about the way the software works, what is safe and what is not. When you really understand what a system can and can’t do, sometimes you also find the passion to both work within the system to optimise it and push the boundaries of what it is doing, as well as recognising that sometimes you just have to change the system itself. I bashed my head against brick IT walls for a decade working at a practice and regional level. Meanwhile I was encouraged and mentored at a distance by the experienced informaticians I encountered at national meetings such as the Primary Health Care Specialists Group, and they gradually positioned me to accept some national positions such as joining the Health Informatics Group at the Royal College of General Practitioners to represent the profession at the Joint GP IT Committee meetings, working for NHS England in the Primary Care Technology Team and finally, I was thrilled to be invited to work for PRIMIS. The thing is, in the NHS, the tight resource constraints conspire with the constant reorganisation to make it extremely difficult to innovate. PRIMIS is different. As well the clinical advisors being at the top of their game, there is a friendly, motivated team of nice people who are working towards the same goal with mutual respect – producing tools of great quality (sometimes outstanding), without getting hung up on perfection. We make solid, reliable outputs which bring genuine value to the patients of the NHS. Yes, PRIMIS is in the limelight with our clever programmes like PINCER, but we’re also there behind the scenes, taking care of the little nitty gritty things like getting the codes right for who does and who doesn’t get a flu jab, and maintaining some of the hundreds of little code lists that drive our national programmes. We quietly go about our business, keeping the NHS afloat where we can. So as an informatician, I have projects I care about such as working with the Motor Neurone Disease Association to see if we can build a tool to detect it earlier. I’ve got a team that gives me the space to innovate and excel in my work, while keeping me doing what I do best which is think through the clinical challenges and work out how to compute them. I know that my work is going to be supported by the rest of the team, and I don’t need to do everything myself – it’s hugely refreshing. I genuinely believe we are entering a Golden Age of health information technology. We have never been better positioned to work with health data for the greater good, and I get to be a part of it, riding on the coat tails of some fantastic people at PRIMIS and being nurtured to be the best informatician I can.
It’s not often that you get a chance to work with the best.
Having grown up building computers and programming games in BASIC on a BBC Micro, I press all the buttons in software to see what happens. Sometimes terrible things happen, sometimes wonderful, but each time I learn something about the way the software works, what is safe and what is not. When you really understand what a system can and can’t do, sometimes you also find the passion to both work within the system to optimise it and push the boundaries of what it is doing, as well as recognising that sometimes you just have to change the system itself.
I bashed my head against brick IT walls for a decade working at a practice and regional level. Meanwhile I was encouraged and mentored at a distance by the experienced informaticians I encountered at national meetings such as the Primary Health Care Specialists Group, and they gradually positioned me to accept some national positions such as joining the Health Informatics Group at the Royal College of General Practitioners to represent the profession at the Joint GP IT Committee meetings, working for NHS England in the Primary Care Technology Team and finally, I was thrilled to be invited to work for PRIMIS.
The thing is, in the NHS, the tight resource constraints conspire with the constant reorganisation to make it extremely difficult to innovate. PRIMIS is different. As well the clinical advisors being at the top of their game, there is a friendly, motivated team of nice people who are working towards the same goal with mutual respect – producing tools of great quality (sometimes outstanding), without getting hung up on perfection. We make solid, reliable outputs which bring genuine value to the patients of the NHS.
Yes, PRIMIS is in the limelight with our clever programmes like PINCER, but we’re also there behind the scenes, taking care of the little nitty gritty things like getting the codes right for who does and who doesn’t get a flu jab, and maintaining some of the hundreds of little code lists that drive our national programmes. We quietly go about our business, keeping the NHS afloat where we can.
So as an informatician, I have projects I care about such as working with the Motor Neurone Disease Association to see if we can build a tool to detect it earlier. I’ve got a team that gives me the space to innovate and excel in my work, while keeping me doing what I do best which is think through the clinical challenges and work out how to compute them. I know that my work is going to be supported by the rest of the team, and I don’t need to do everything myself – it’s hugely refreshing.
I genuinely believe we are entering a Golden Age of health information technology. We have never been better positioned to work with health data for the greater good, and I get to be a part of it, riding on the coat tails of some fantastic people at PRIMIS and being nurtured to be the best informatician I can.
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