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In her new role as Medical Director at the East Midlands AHSN, Gail Allsopp acts as the strategic lead for our medicines optimisation, patient safety and health informatics and analytics workstreams. Gail will apply her clinical knowledge to drive improvement and the adoption of best practice across the region. In this blog, Gail talks about her background and applying this experience, a need to share best practice across the system and her passion to support the health and care workforce.
I’ve had a varied career journey and a slightly unconventional path to becoming a GP. My medical career spans 23 years, of which I initially started in secondary care concentrating on surgery and radiology. After this, I chose general practice as it gave me the potential to combine all of the things I enjoy – working with patients, academia and education.
In addition to my role as a GP, I am also an Associate Professor in Primary Care and General Practice Careers Lead at the University of Nottingham. On a national basis, I am Clinical Lead for Clinical Policy at the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). I am also a Trustee of a Children’s hospice in Loughborough, which I feel strongly about supporting.
I am extremely excited to take on this new role of Medical Director at the East Midlands AHSN as it feels like a perfect use of the varied experience acquired over my career.
Having worked in both an acute secondary care setting and within primary care, I will be able to apply these different perspectives and this clinical insight when looking at potential innovations and best practice approaches. I hope to pool all of my knowledge to strategically support the organisation to best serve the health and care system, understanding the priorities and challenges the system is posed with and the intricacies about how proposed solutions would and should work in practice if they are to be effective and sustainable.
I was initially attracted to this role following a project I undertook in my Clinical Policy role for the RCGP. In the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, the AHSNs and the RCGP collaborated to deliver webinars, in the areas of patient assessment and the role of physiology and oximetry, COVID and children and primary care in care homes during COVID-19.
In my view, these webinars were an obvious way to share best practice on key issues and that’s when I started to look more closely at the work of the AHSN Network and my local AHSN in the East Midlands and realised that the aim of these organisations aligns perfectly with my goals and passion to spread best practice and encourage innovation.
With the primary care in care homes webinar, we knew there was some excellent work happening collaboratively between GPs and care homes (despite the picture painted in the media) and the aim was sharing this innovation and spreading this best practice to benefit health and care professionals and residents. In the work they do, the AHSN’s role is very much to understand needs of the system and the patient and then seek out innovation (either the potential for innovation or where it is already being applied on a small scale), share this and support its sustainability.
This approach to establishing gaps, sharing the right innovations to fill a space of need in the most appropriate part of the system and doing so at scale, rather than in small pockets, really excited me and ultimately gave me the drive to take on the role.
I have a real passion and commitment to building, retaining and protecting the health and care workforce through effective training and support. Without the workforce, we don’t have a service for patients.
I have used my expertise to support the workforce in my role at the University of Nottingham by innovating within the medical curriculum, acting as a careers lead, undertaking research into the GP workforce and developing innovations in collaboration with Health Education England such as the “GP Academy” to help recruit and retain the primary care workforce within the region.
The AHSNs have a real role to play in the workforce agenda. When looking at innovation, it presents the opportunity to understand current practice and promote recruitment, but also, importantly by supporting our workforce, looking for best practice and ensuring people reach their full potential. I hope we can support personal growth, better retention of staff, improved patient experiences and enhance the overall effectiveness of the system.
The workforce is like the foundations of a big building, there is no point in rolling out an innovation or improvement programme without considering the people that will be part of that implementation. In my role, I will look to be that clinical voice and ask those important clinical questions to understand how we can support the effective adoption of innovation considering the practical commitment of the workforce and the potential wider benefits created by efficiencies.
Gail Allsopp, Medical Director