David Thompson
I’m based in the central information team of a large, acute, foundation trust. I don’t fill a specific role but rather I work on various aspects of both large and small projects. This approach allows me the freedom to go outside the Information team if an interesting piece of work comes up so that I can experience more of what the trust does and develop a wider range of skills.
Monday
Monday is primarily a day of setting up the work for the week. I’ll review how my current projects are going, plan out the work I need to complete this week and who I need to meet. I’ll email or call people to try to arrange those meetings and I’ll start researching any new jobs I’ve been given by my manager last Friday.
Monday is also the day our online informatics modules are usually refreshed, so I’ll log onto the website to get an idea of the work I have so I can set up my week properly, both work and study.
Tuesday
Tuesday is usually a day of few distractions which allows me to press on with my project work. At the moment I’m working on a project to hand over an IT systems process to our external IT provider. The process is the regular batch updating of the NHS numbers on our patient administration system. If I don’t specify it correctly then new patients on our system won’t have correct NHS numbers which puts the hospital at a financial risk. Today I’ll be shadowing and interviewing people to make sure that I correctly understand exactly what they do and the order that they do it in.
Wednesday
After all my shadowing yesterday it’s time to make a start on the core of my process handover project, the process documentation. Quite often I’d spend today working on a different project from yesterday, to make sure all my projects are progressing well, but this project is a priority and I have a draft deadline for Friday so I need to get writing.
Thursday
Thursday is typically my day of meetings. On top of weekly patient access and data quality meetings, emergency preparedness and contingency planning, information governance group and the information team meetings all occur at least once a month so I’m sure to be in a meeting or two.
I also try to make sure I budget some time to make sure I’m on top of my graduate scheme responsibilities such as any competencies I’ve completed or any days I have out of the office soon ahead of my meeting with my manager tomorrow. As it happens I’ve volunteered to give a presentation to the new graduate scheme intake so I’ll be out of the office next Thursday afternoon.
Friday
Friday is my day for review, a fairly informal one to one meeting with my line manager gives us a chance to discuss how my projects are progressing and for him to give me both helpful advice and more work to keep me busy and out of trouble.