My journey into tech wasn’t exactly linear. I wanted to be a hairdresser after I came out of university with a Business Management degree. Life took a different turn and I became one of the first police community support officers in West Yorkshire and, at about that point, I started to realise that I wanted to do something that gave back to the community.
I joined what was then Connecting for Health, a predecessor of NHS Digital, about 15 years ago and have mainly worked in Live Services, specialising in onboarding and Primary Care Governance since then.
This year, I took a different track and moved into our Collaboration Services team to lead the Centre of Excellence for NHSmail and M365.
I admit, before I joined this team, I thought it was going to be mainly about email and Microsoft Teams – but it is so much more. In just the first hour I was astounded by the potential of what we were doing.
We're building on the functionality given to 1.6 million accounts in the pandemic. That was a breakneck response. We allowed people across the health and care system to transition to working from home, basically overnight.
I'm still waiting for that moment when I am in a GP surgery or a hospital and see something on the screen that my team has delivered to the NHS. Maybe then I can show my family what I do and perhaps get them to stop asking me to fix their computers!
