Consultant Psychiatrist - Black Country Healthcare NHSFT
Division Digital Clinical Officer - Black Country Healthcare NHSFT
Training Programme Director - Digital/TEL - School of Psychiatry - Health Education West Midlands
I was appointed as the first Digital Fellow for Psychiatry in the West Midlands during the Covid-19 pandemic. The role of digital learning was fast becoming the norm at the time, but we had no platform that was the clearly defined way of organising anything. As with any new platform there were challenges to overcome, including gaining engagement from trainees and teachers and changing our way of learning and teaching to a way that was more flexible but produced an equal if not greater results in terms of learning. The West Midlands is quite a large geographic area and the Psychiatric training was mainly taking place in Birmingham. As one of the smallest specialties CAMHS, we felt the need of coming together in a virtual environment for our learning, actually enhanced our learning opportunities due to the fact that we didn’t lose time travelling. We could also obtain a wider array of speakers and they could attend our teaching sessions in a more flexible manner. On top of that, I helped organise and run quite a few events on PGVLE.co.uk for Psychiatry and the Higher training and also had the opportunity to train others to do the same. In terms of my training, that experience was the most significant management challenge of something completely non-clinical. The skills from there have enabled me to develop a management style and gave me the capacity to do more.
When my time as a trainee came to an end and I was appointed as a Consultant I realised that much of the management and technical understanding that I gained from my experience, was also wanted in areas of the trust as my trust was going through a digital transformation process. This has allowed me to take up a role as a Divisional Digital Clinical Officer – which is a newly developed clinicians role – under the Chief Clinical Information Officer – within a multidisciplinary team of other DDCO’s – each one with our own specialties/localities and areas of expertise and interests. In this way I managed to get involved in a role that can affect change in a real way for patients and staff. I am involved in projects that I always wanted to be involved in as a trainee – and was upset about the fact that clinical representation was missing to avoid previous errors in implementation, now I feel I am part of that group that can prevent errors, choose the right equipment, software and develop it further.
I have subsequently been appointed as TPD for Digital TEL in the West Midlands Deanery School of Psychiatry which will hopefully enable me to enact change and start defining a role that is quickly becoming a necessity for any school/University and institution. I hope that we can develop best practice that can be followed by others and hopefully improve the trainees overall training experience and expand the ways that you can learn as the training and teaching roles are constantly evolving.