NHS Expo Event!

31st August 2015- 4th September 2015

As the week was short due to the bank holiday, the week went even faster than usual- so apologies for the late blog post!

At the beginning of the week, I began writing my first contract for the Ophthalmology service. Before I started my placement, I had no idea how complex NHS contracts were so I definitely learnt a lot doing this and enjoyed doing it. 

On Thursday I had the privilege of attending the NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo 2015/16 event at Manchester Central Convention Centre. It was a big event over two days with around 5000 people attending each day. There were various exhibition stands, stimulating workshops in the ‘pop-up universities’ and key note speeches about Innovation and the Future NHS. I gained a great deal of knowledge and understanding at the workshops and enjoyed learning about the progress we are making and the new systems in place to defragment processes and ultimately improve quality. The NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens gave an interesting talk and Jeremy Hunt MP, The Secretary of State For Health challenged the NHS to ensure all patients were able to access their full medical records online by 2018, accompanied by a commitment to a review of data security.

Ultimately the event was a celebration of innovation and improvement in the NHS, to further integrate our efforts and spread adoption of the best new ideas. It was great to see how optimistic, ambitious and driven everyone was in improving the NHS. NHS England Chair Sir Malcom Grant closed the event highlighting the importance of innovation in the NHS and said innovation is a catalyst to productivity. He said “Innovation is the lifeblood of any successful industry – industries come up on the wave of innovation, but if they fail to continue innovating then they fail."

On Friday I attended my first Locality Meeting, which is a meeting between the GPs and Practice Managers in Eastern Cheshire and the CCG in order for us to provide the GPs with updates on work streams. This gave me a good overview of all the latest projects and the chance to meet the GPs.