My CUH Story – Chloe Giles

I am personal assistant (PA) to the Division A head of nursing, Rachael May, and her deputy, Sian Brown. My role covers both PA and project management, which is something I really enjoy. Division A at CUH specialises in musculoskeletal (MSK), digestive diseases, major trauma, the intensive care unit (ICU) and perioperative care.

I started my CUH journey in 2019 in the Contact Centre. I had been exploring the idea of nursing, and came across the Contact Centre role which used all my transferrable skills, and I could start straight away. The team were fantastic and it was a really interesting role. I think people underestimate the work that the Contact Centre carries out; it really sets staff up with a general and varied education within CUH to go forward and progress into a wide variety of roles across many different departments.

I’ve only been in this role since the end of May 2022. It was a newly created role so there’s been a lot to set up and I have established many new processes and policies. My current role also incorporates an element of project management, and includes supporting my manager in bringing a fresh approach, such as creating their first divisional staff newsletter, and creating a new weekly Quality and Safety Specialist Review meeting to provide a comprehensive oversight of nursing risk management.

We often have discussions on different ways of doing things, talking about what is or isn’t working, and brainstorm about how things are currently running and what processes, policies or new meetings we can put in place to make service improvements within nursing.

And the PA side of my role includes meeting organisation – coordinating dates, gathering relevant data, working with dashboards to produce reports, and creating slide presentations for meetings, taking minutes, plus many other tasks.

Whilst I’m relatively new to this department, I actually only moved from down the corridor in pathology, where I was previously their data compliance administrator, where I started my apprenticeship course.

I have a lot of pre-analytical experience and was thinking ahead to what I wanted to do next. I was using Excel a lot and, given how busy everyone is, my challenge was to engage with very busy statistically minded people, so I decided I needed to change the way of reporting and presenting reports, so they are quicker and more digestible.

My data compliance administrator role had also been a new role, where I set up new policies and procedures, and carried out audit work where I visited GP surgeries on a monthly basis.

A big part of the role was making sure that the blood results were going out correctly, and when the paperwork we’d received with the blood sample wasn’t compliant, I would have to investigate where the tests had come from and get the results to the correct location.

Whilst it was a very fulfilling and varied role, on a personal level I felt ready to progress, which had been part of the reason for signing up for the apprenticeship course, as well as to look at presenting data, and develop my data skills.

The course I’m doing is the ‘NHS Data Citizen Apprenticeship’. It’s a new course that hasn’t been run before, it’s a 16 month apprenticeship, spending one day per week on study, alongside your full time role.

Everything on the course, the portfolios and the projects, must relate to your day job, and be live projects that you are working on at work. So it’s all very relevant, and is proving a huge asset to both the departments I have worked in during my apprenticeship course. As part of the course we are also assigned a coach, and a technical mentor.

When setting up a new process or procedure it’s absolutely critical that I stop and think about how I’m going to do it, and what the long-term impact is going to be. So I take a lot more time now thinking about how I’m going to set things up, and speak to a lot more people, and consider what the results need to be, who it’s for, and what they are trying to achieve, and I analyse all this in a lot more detail. And the long term effects of doing this far outweigh the extra time at the beginning.

As a result of being on my apprenticeship course I took some of my work to the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and was successful in implementing a change in the process for non-compliant manual request forms. This meant that people get their blood test results quicker, more efficiently and more safely as the electronic process eliminates human error.

I am extremely happy in my current role, I am very hard working, and ambitious so in the long-term I am keen to continue progressing my career within CUH. My background before the NHS is over 25 years in the private commercial sector, including 17 years of entrepreneurism, which I believe has likely led me to these roles where I enjoy setting up and creating new processes, and problem solving, in order to address and implement change in order to get them into a state where I can hand them over.

The apprenticeship course has also incorporated the Edward Jenner programme which looks at management and leadership. I whizzed through that section as I found it so interesting, however I am also very interested in the operational side of the hospital, and looking at the recruiting process.

I am a member of the Race Equality and Cultural Heritage (REACH) network here at CUH, I am also a Diversity Inclusion Panellist (DIP), assisting with the recruitment and selection process. It’s very important to both our staff and patients that we have such a diverse workforce.

Equality, diversity and inclusion means a lot to me and I am honoured to be a finalist in the 2022 Multicultural Apprenticeship Awards (opens in a new tab). I’m extremely grateful to my manager, Rachael May, who took the time out of her already extremely busy schedule to write a reference for me, which formed part of the application.

When you really look at it, everyone in the NHS is using data in some way, and on my course there are a few of us at CUH doing this course, however we’re all from different departments, and on different bands between bands 2-7.

You can find out more about NHS Digital Apprenticeships here (opens in a new tab).

The apprenticeship is a great opportunity - it’s really interesting and I’ve enjoyed meeting lots of new people from across the hospital. It is extremely hard work, and at times quite intense over the 16 months, so you need to be able to manage your time really well. I’m coming to the end of my apprenticeship now and working towards my end point assessment, and I am really looking forward to finishing it in the New Year.

However, I would definitely recommend the ‘NHS Data Citizen Apprenticeship’!