According to the Academy of Medical Sciences 'Preparing for a challenging winter 2020/21' there "must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter".

The COVID crisis has driven acceptance of some significant cultural changes in Health. Previously resisted, but forced through because of the crisis, the benefits are transparent and countrywide in nearly every setting.

Much if not all of the information in your daily, weekly or monthly reports will have been originated by a person, one who goes into a system and manually inputs a number.

We often visit CEO’s, Heads of Transformation, culture “experts” and performance leads, to talk about transformation and performance improvement. We often hear data is the new golden bullet that will help them be smarter, do a better job, drive more revenue or provide a better service.

I’ll tell you what’s scary. Over the last 4 weeks, I’ve seen massive government departments, big corporate businesses, care homes and other critical front-line organisations spin up spreadsheet after spreadsheet to help them manage what is now the fastest-changing operational environment they’ve ever seen.

Is there such a thing as a successful week, in crisis?

I can honestly say, at the end of a VERY long week, I LOVE the InPhase team. I thought I did before, but I hadn't seen anything. The power of people coming together in the face of adversity is incredible. I'll be honest, we discussed at SMT furloughing staff, taking the 80%...for all of 1 minute. And then we said, "Nah, let's do something really awesome."

How are you doing?

When COVID-19 first hit, I wanted to make sure all of our customers, as well as our staff, were OK.

We setup a process to call all of our customers and asked them “how can we help” (many of our customers are key service providers; the NHS and health service providers, Local Authorities, Fire Services, Social Housing providers). They all said “we are really struggling with understanding what’s happening with our workforce. We are finding it difficult to manage key actions and who has to perform the high priority actions with so many people going off sick and self-isolating.” Mobile working clearly added to the complexity.