At Provide Community our healthcare professionals are responsible for the delivery of over 50 health and social care services and strive to deliver life-changing care through care, innovation, and compassion.
However, our frontline staff would not be able to deliver this care without the fantastic support from the entire Provide workforce, which includes our behind-the-scenes workers who oversee daily operations and make sure everything functions as smoothly as possible.
One of the key teams at Provide Community is the IT and Transformation department, which is dedicated to keeping all electronic data safe and secure. Christopher Wright is Director of IT and Transformation and splits his week between the IT and Transformation teams. Chris has worked for Provide Community since its creation and is passionate about keeping Provide Community agile and innovative as it grows.
What is your role at Provide Community?
My current role at Provide Community is Director of IT and Transformation. My role is split into looking after IT one day a week and the rest of the week I’m working on transformation.
1. How long have you worked in your role?
I’ve been splitting my time between IT and Transformation since April 2022, prior to my current role I was more involved in the IT systems and information governance side of things.
I started working for Provide since its foundation, but first joined Broomfield Hospital in December of 2004 and shortly after moved to Maldon and South Chelmsford Primary Care Trust, which has eventually led me to my current role.
2. Where are you based?
I’m officially based at the Provide Community headquarters in Colchester, which I visit one day a week. But for the rest of the week, I work from my home office.
3. Whom do you work with and how do you help them?
Because of the nature of my job, I could be working with anybody across the Provide Community group, it’s different every day. At the moment, we are running a tender for a new mobile phone provider for React which is one of our group companies. This includes reviewing how they currently run their systems and whether or not we can help them run more efficiently.
Alongside running the tender evaluation, this week I have spent the majority of my time working with the Essex Sexual Health Service as the new specification will be going live on 1 April.
However, next week I could be working with a completely different group of people!
4. How does your day typically start?
I’m usually an early riser! When I’m home I tend to start early, tackling any urgent emails and going through my diary and block out time in my calendar for the day so my team can see my availability. I then stop to do the morning school drop-off before jumping back online at 8.30am.
5. Can you give some examples of a project that you enjoyed working on?
One of the elements of my job includes bidding for funding so that we can implement new initiatives to optimise the efficiency of our services at Provide Community. We recently had a successful bid to PODAC (the Digital Community Pharmacy, Optometry, Dentistry, Ambulance, Community Care Programme), which allowed us to introduce new Smartphones, Dragon Dictation, Brigid and the Autoplanner for efficient scheduling of patient visits, which has saved us untold amounts of time.
Since piloting Autoplanner, the software is now being rolled out across Provide Community for others to use. Being part of a project from the very beginning, which usually starts with a bid for funding, to seeing it through to completion is incredibly rewarding.
6. What hours do you usually work?
I have a very flexible working pattern; Monday to Friday I usually work early to somewhere between 4 pm and 6 pm, with weekends and evenings as needed.
7. What do you like best about your job?
The best part of my job is being able to see the difference that we make, it can be very disheartening to work on a bid for an extended amount of time and then not secure funding. But the good outweighs the bad, especially when the differences you make increase productivity and efficiency for the entire organisation.
8. How important is colleague support in your role?
Colleague support is absolutely vital, I wouldn’t be able to do my job without the people around me. I could have a great idea for the IT systems, but I wouldn’t be able to implement new initiatives unless other people buy into it and we share it with one another, so colleague support is vital.
9. Tell us why IT and Transformation are important to you and Provide Community?
IT and transformation keeps us modern and enables us to grow in new areas and helps us be efficient in the work we do.
Sometimes it can feel like we’re making things more difficult for people who need to log in to accounts and files, but the IT department is responsible for all electronic records so it’s important that we make sure data is secure and protected.
If Provide was at threat from a major cyber-attack the whole organisation with be at risk, so making sure we have capabilities and tabs on all files and data is important.
10. If you could have a magic wand for your department, what would your three wishes be?
I’d like to have a bigger development team to develop our own solutions, even though we already have a development team, I would like to expand on this and do extra things in-house, in
addition to working with Provide Digital. I’d also like for our office to be closer to nature and surrounded by wildlife to see during the day, I would bring my camera to work! and I’d like a jukebox in the office.
