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Week 70: Ideas Summit

Posted by
Frankie Roberto
Published
Photo of me stood at the front of a room with a microphone, in front of a slide saying ‘60 seconds per team’

The highlight of this week was our annual away day in Leeds for the NHS vaccination digital services (VDS) teams, which I’d spent the last couple of months helping to organise.

We also said goodbye to our Deputy Director, Helena Powell, whose energetic leadership and enthusiastic championing of our work will be missed.

The sessions

Here’s how we structured the day:

  1. Opening talks from our leadership team, looking back at the past year and discussing the challenges ahead
  2. Quick-fire intros from each of our teams - this was my idea, giving each team 60 seconds to describe themselves, highlight a recent success and end on a light-hearted note. The main aim was to give new joiners an overview of the breadth of our work, and to try and prompt conversations between teams later in the day.
  3. A talk about the future strategy and direction for our services.
  4. Following a break, a pair of talks from 2 external speakers about vaccine hesitancy, Professor Helen Bedford from UCL and Dr Dawn Holford from the Jitsuvax project. This wasn’t explicitly about digital, and a lot of the evidence pointed towards giving patients more time to have conversations with health professionals, but it got me thinking about the role of digital within the wider vaccination programme, particularly when it comes to communications and the ease and availability of getting vaccines.
  5. After lunch, I hosted a panel session with 3 guests from different NHS settings – pharmacies, GPs and hospitals – to discuss their use of digital services and platforms to deliver vaccination programmes. I always value hearing directly from our users, and it was both heartening and motivating listening to their stories of where our services have helped them, and where they’d fallen short.
  6. Our last speaker was Dr Lisa Stockdale from the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, who had the audience gripped by her tales of working on the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and R21 malaria vaccine.
  7. We finished up with a semi-serious group activity to come up with a pitch for a new prevention service, using AI if they liked, followed by a crowd vote for the winner. People seemed to get into the spirit, and it let us end on a fun, energetic note.

Notes from organising the event

On the way back from the event I jotted down some notes from helping organise the event, things that worked well and a few lessons learnt.

Sharing these here mainly so I can refer back to them if I get involved with organising the event next year - feel free to skip ahead to this week’s links.

Before the event

  • Select and invite speakers early. This was the first thing we did. Use existing contacts where you have them, but cold calling people you’ve seen elsewhere or read about online works too.
  • Sort out travel for the speakers. We were able to order train tickets for them, to save them having to faff about with expense claims.
  • Avoid having events during half-term. (This was a mistake.)
  • Be less ambiguous about whether attendance is expected. We had a good attendance in the end and probably the room couldn’t have taken many more, but teams were left to make their own decisions on whether the travel was justified or not.
  • Try and limit the number of slide decks to juggle between. Speakers will often want to tweak their slides right to the wire, and that’s fair enough, but the more you can collate into a single deck, the easier.

On the day

  • Have at least one person hanging around in the lobby to help sign people in and look out for lost people.
  • Bring the energy. I think it’s ok to slightly over-egg how hyped you are, in order to try and lift the level in the room.
  • Make sure you have a slide clicker. I bought one last minute for a tenner in a local shop, and it was worth every penny not to hear “next slide please” every other minute.
  • Provide lunch. You don’t want people to have to leave the building. The chats during lunch and the breaks are a big part of the day’s value.
  • Have something for attendees to take away as a memento. We had stickers this time, it could also be a lanyard or other item.
  • Make sure all the external speakers are introduced to our most senior staff present so they can be thanked in person.
  • Finish early. We we wrapped-up by 4pm, leaving plenty of time for people to come to an after-event social, or else start travelling home.

After the event

  • Thank the external speakers again by email.
  • Send the feedback form out to all attendees.
  • Collect any good photos of the event into a shared folder.
  • Share the speaker’s slides with attendees (if they don’t mind).
  • Have a rest.

I’m off to see Public Service Broadcasting at the Barbican tonight, where they’re playing a special gig with the London Contemporary Orchestra. Excited!