Looking Forward to Rewired
With Digital Health Rewired just days ahead, Lisa Emery, CIO at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust looks ahead to her must-see sessions.
It’s been a busy few weeks as ever, and Rewired is almost upon us. I know we will all miss the buzz of seeing people in person, but there is a wealth of content to make the most of.
Writing this in the week of International Women’s Day, it’s great to again see a diverse speaker line-up for the event. I’ve always felt that if we are to deliver the best possible services, our digital leaders and teams need to mirror the diversity of the patients and staff we serve. It’s been a bit of a personal soapbox (along with committed peers of course!) over the years to put pressure on conference organisers more generally to make sure speakers and panels are truly representative.
How best to ensure our services are truly inclusive is something we have been working on within our organisation, brought into even sharper relief by the sheer scale at which we’ve converted to working from home, and adopting virtual meetings and patient interactions. Many staff, patients and carers have been thrown into new ways of interacting with services they have traditionally accessed face to face, and the capacity of digital teams to deliver the best training and support has been truly stretched as a result.
We know we need to do more in terms of the way we involve service users in design, deployment and support, so it is going to be interesting to hear and learn from speakers over the course of next week in terms of how they have tackled these challenges.
In terms of leadership development and support, the Digital Leadership Summit looks to offer some fascinating insights, with sessions on developing BAME leaders, and a set of workshops covering development of our future digital leaders.
As we all continue to respond to recent events and look to plans for the future, a series of presentations, workshops and round tables will be addressing a range of issues taking on board learning from the rapid changes made in response to the Covid pandemic, lessons from successful transformation programmes, and insights into putting the patient at the centre of innovation and service design.
With the hot topic of the upcoming formalisation of integrated care systems at the front of many minds, interoperability continues to be a key conference theme. The opening day’s Interoperability Summit is sure to deliver great content and lively debate and discussion – I can’t wait to ‘digest’ the intriguing-sounding Great Interoperability Bake Off!
Get your ticket for Digital Health Rewired 2021 to join the must-attend virtual festival celebrating the best of digital health and care, taking place across 15-19 March 2021.
