Tag: Change

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Addressing a City’s Challenges

The Met’s Digital Policing Strategy is a fine response to the challenges of a large, cosmopolitan city in the not so new millennium.  You can access the strategy via the link below but here are a few highlights.

  • Use technology to widen and deepen engagement with citizens, making use of digital channels and generating open data to improve transparency.
  • Really leverage data to develop a better understanding of citizens, communities and the factors impacting on their safety (and their perceptions of safety).
  • Integrate with partner processes and systems to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration and, hence, improve end-to-end service delivery.
  • Equip staff (particularly those on the front line) with ability enhancing technology so that they really can do more without increasing the risks to their safety or health.
  • Industrialise the gathering, classification and retention of digital evidence allowing this valuable content to provide actionable intelligence.
  • Consolidate incident, case, capability and asset data so that staff can access the service’s acquired knowledge more easily and operate more effectively.
  • The best services are customer centric and similarly modern policing needs to be citizen centric; utilising technology to provide a single person view.

Digital Policing at the Met

 

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Consultants & Architects

Having had an unplanned stay in hospital (I wouldn’t recommend pneumonia), I’ve been reflecting on the experience. Maybe I’m a bit strange but I can’t help but look at it through a consultancy lense; maybe interesting, maybe sad.

The paramedics were a bit like a sales team, always there when you call and full of reassuring words. Beneath the relationship management, there’s a real focus on qualifying out (you’re OK, you don’t need our help) or quickly getting you to hospital. The wards, with their skilled doctors and nurses, were like development teams, varied and core to delivery. From the intensity of acute care to the relatively sedate pace of a regular ward, patients perceive that it all happens in the wards. Finally, the consultants were like architects, focused on understanding the patient and determining what programme of treatment they really need. Their skill is getting behind the symptoms, understanding the underlying challenges and defining a course of treatment that will really work to bring about improvement.

After being deposited in casualty, consultants were the first medics that I saw. Initially, they directed the team on which examinations to conduct in order to figure out what was wrong with me and what interventions would best tackle my problems. Once things had calmed down, they spent more time talking to me, understanding how the treatments impacted and keeping me informed on what would happen.

During my time on the wards, the consultants were still overseeing my care. They would pop back, keeping me updated and making necessary adjustments to the plan.

TrainingThe big surprise for me has been since leaving hospital. I’ve been handed over to a new consultant but she has full access to my details as well as the treatments established. There are tests planned to ensure that the treatment has worked but much of my time with the consultant has been focused on explaining what’s happened, reviewing progress to date and advising me on how best to assure short and long term recovery. The advice has been really useful; I know where I need to play it safe and where I should push to accelerate progress. Though the planned tests will be an objective assessment of success, I feel that I know what they’ll show because the consultant has alerted me to the signs and I’m alive to how I can manage things to get the outcomes that I want.

I wanted to thank about a hundred people for my care but the consultants stand out as shaping my treatment and really helping me to drive my recovery.

Now, back to architecture.