Hannah, Health Informatics

What does your placement involve?

I am an analyst at Mersey Care, which is a Mental Health and Community Trust in the North West, it’s quite a big trust. I’m in the corporate strategy team. It’s all about forward planning and population health. It’s looking at what do we do as an organisation that best serves our population, more so than the day-to-day operational side of things. I’ve been modelling some community care pathways to try and look at the impact that the expansion of telehealth and remote monitoring would have on those from staffing perspectives and then also from patient flow perspectives. I’ve also been involved in projects looking at prevention, both for mental and physical health.

What formal training do you get beyond EGA as an Informatics Trainee?

The EGA (Elizabeth Garrett Anderson award) is a diploma for General Management trainees and a certificate for us. But we do a diploma in Healthcare Informatics, it’s joint between UCL and Manchester. It’s online, but every module has three days of face to face. So I have actually met other trainees in real life in London or in Manchester – and that’s been really good!

What is you favourite part of the Scheme

Meeting other trainees. You get twenty work experiences for the price of one by hearing about other people’s roles and placements and lives. I mean, obviously it’s not the same as living and breathing that person’s work, but you get such an insight into how all these different parts of the NHS work. I think another part that I enjoy is the passport that it seems to provide you, to have conversations with people in various leadership positions.