Lots of conversations over the past 36 hours about the ways in which working in healthcare and healthcare education works, doesn’t work and could work.
Overwhelmingly, people are here because of the opportunity to work with like-minded people, to learn from each other, to be creative but, above all, to work on a probelm collaboratively and to get something DONE! Frustration experienced in the slowness, sil-mentality and stifling of creativity is evident in speaking to people and everyone wants to see the energy, enthusiasm and inter-disciplinary ways of working and collaborating that is exemplified in a hack event, translated into the culture of the NHS. Hack events can, in some ways, provide the space to think, create, play and do, a space where people are literally given the permission to innovate in ways that maybe isn’t always possible in the busy, crazy, pressurised world of healthcare.
If innovation is forged at the interface of different people, from different backgrounds, with different skills and perspectives and a can-do attitude that is focused on specific problems or challenges, then increasingly the NHS is looking for ways to facilitate those interfaces.
Health Education England is exploring ways in which we can help facilitate such interfaces and TELHack has been borne out of our desire to do so. Equally important though, is what happens after events like this.