1000 Lives - a work retrospective

Today was my last day at 1000 Lives Improvement. It's been five years and it was definitely time to move on. However, it's hard to say goodbye to people you have worked with and grown to care about. As Cathy pointed out, five years is the same length of time I was at secondary school. It's longer than my niece has been alive! So, it is a significant chunk of time.

Anyway, here are some high points...

Count me in
This was a big campaign shortly after I started to maintain the momentum of the 1000 Lives Campaign in the new 1000 Lives Plus programme. This photo is notable for my mini-sideburns and the blue jacket that I wore a lot to work events.

The STOP Campaign
This was the first time we really built comms into a clinical change programme. The mascots were fun to develop, especially the catheter (first time round it looked really rude). STOP won a CIPR Pride Award - I wrote a report on it if you want to know more.

Champions for Health
Another big campaign, this time looking at improving the health of NHS staff and encourage them to become advocates for healthier lifestyles. I took part in the pilot. (Blue jacket in the photo!)

World Sepsis Day
One day I will blog about the car journey I had with Terence Canning, the Welsh ambassador for the UK Sepsis Trust. On that journey we coined a phrase that has appeared on numerous awareness-raising materials and has even been borrowed by other organisations. I had the poster on my wall by my desk at work as a reminder that good writing is often short writing.

We also interviewed Terence for one of the videos we shot for World Sepsis Day.

The International Forum - London
Probably one of my favourite weeks at 1000 Lives was manning the NHS Wales at the IHI International Forum in London in 2013, with my lovely friend Kelly. Almost unbelievably, having spent 15 hours a day in each other's company we ended the week better friends than when we started. On the way down we decided our names weren't Welsh enough so we adopted the names Iolo and Myfanwy. Little did we know those names would stick.

At the end of the week we posed by the London Bus they had in the main auditorium. You can see how tired we were.

Dr Olivia
Towards the end of last year I spent nearly six weeks working on placement in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. What with a Daily Mail hate campaign against NHS Wales, rumours about ebola, and a grisly incident involving a possible patient, it was a chance to experience the deep end of NHS comms.

We also got to film Dr Olivia's Guide to A&E - Is it really an emergency? I'm not sure how many videos I produced while at 1000 Lives. It's well over 100. This is one of my favourites.



Publications
In the past five years I've written six annual newspapers (plus three others) and 14 white papers. These are the latest ones.

Legacy

I've left these on my desk to intimidate my replacement. 3 gold awards in 2 years is a pretty good return. (As the person who wrote the entries as well, I felt doubly satisfied with the wins!)

So, those are just some highlights. There were many more. It's been a good five years.