Leading from within Informatics – Reigniting the Fire and Expanding Horizons.

I would like to thank; Liz Robb & the Trustees of the Florence Nightingale Foundation, Sue Neville,  Susan Hamer, Sue Machell,  Professor Steve Wheeler,  Irene Scott-Gray and my fellow scholars.

I am a registered nurse with an unusual background and career that spans almost 3 decades.  There are periods in your career where it is useful to reignite your passions and expand your horizons, not only to focus on your personal journey, but also to check to see if you are doing the best you can for the profession.  The Leadership Scholarship from the Foundation is a perfect springboard to achieve these objectives.

Working as a nurse in informatics is not always an easy space to occupy – you are neither seen as a ‘nurse’ nor as a ‘technical expert’ and although that edge between both worlds creates opportunities it can also be a lonely space to be.  The chance to move closer to nursing and to create a bigger space for debate about informatics was always a personal objective and the scholarship was a great place to start to address some of these aspirations.  The scholarship has allowed me to reignite and share my passion for informatics but also social media and the potential they both create for the future.

The Scholarship has given me many great opportunities to develop myself as a leader and to refocus my career.  It has included great learning opportunities and has expanded my horizons, allowed me to look at myself as a leader in the profession, and focus on maximising the opportunities that are there if we seek to take them.

I have attended a broad range of development programmes during the year; subjects included change, organisational development to a high level, politics and a brilliant innovation workshop with Google organised by a fellow scholar. My access to an Organisational Development Practitioner Programme was a key part of my learning as this opportunity would otherwise been out of my reach.  It helped me to think through, as a leader, the connections between personal leadership and the context of organisations.  Visiting Buurtzorg, a district nursing service in the Netherlands, was a key experience, refocusing my leadership attention on the broader horizons of nursing, beyond my specialist field.  These were important experiences that have created fundamental shifts in my leadership journey and were made possible through the scholarship.

My project looking at the professional aspects of social media has hopefully added knowledge to the collective nursing resource about using social media in practice and I am aiming to continue my learning and sharing in this leadership space. I see social media as a key part of our social future and nursing needs to understand how it can make the best use of the opportunities this brings.

Of course all of the experiences are coupled with access to new networks, fellow scholars and excellent coaches.  The chance to study in this way, alongside the networks it creates, liberates leadership potential.