Words. Powerful things, words.
I did my initial training in psychiatry in Liverpool, where they have a wonderful way with words. "No mark" is the name they give to an individual who makes no mark, no impression, is of no lasting use.
Maybe like some of you, I have a horror of making no mark on my profession or, indeed, on the world.
While it is not in my gift to make a difference to the world in the way that my heroes Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela made a difference, I can make a difference – we can make a difference – in our little section of the world, health IT.
Five pages of A4 can change the world
Now, I’m more stand-up comedian than genius orator, but Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech shows us the value of a clear vision of what needs to be delivered. It shows that a few well chosen words can sometimes make all the difference.
The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up when I hear it; the words of the Rev Martin Luther King, spoken on 28 August, 1963.
I was only two years old when he made the famous speech. I’m not sure when I first heard it, but I’m sure that I didn’t know what it meant. Nonetheless, every time I heard it, it had the same effect.
The first time I possessed a copy of it, it was on vinyl, and I played it whenever I felt the need for inspiration.
The speech has been recently revisited because of its 50th anniversary, and it has been repeated on TV and radio. As usual, the icy fingers have been running down my spine and leaving me wishing that I could ever find such words to move the world to better place.
I am always amazed, when I see the speech written down, just how short it was. Five and a half pages of double spaced A4.
We now know that the uplifting “I have a dream” element wasn’t even scripted. King merely ad-libbed on some of his favourite themes, urged on by gospel singing legend Mahalia Jackson. "Tell’em about the dream Martin," she shouted.
He told them.
Daring to dream
The anniversary celebrations set me thinking about the dreams that you and I share. Yes, you and me.
You find yourself on this page because you have a dream and it’s somewhat grander than you and I sometimes let on. Just like King, we want to change the world and we want to make it a better place.
Just because our skills and abilities put us in a world that, to the outsiders, seems like a slightly dry and technical one, doesn’t mean we are any less passionate about the job in hand.
In fact, I know many of you – maybe even all of you – who bother to read these ramblings month in and month out, burn with a passion to make things better for patients.
Many of you are motivated by specific patients who might still be with us if we’d had better systems. We dream of a world in which there are no more Victoria Climbies. We dream of a world where record systems flag up and prevent the next Baby P.
We dream of information good enough to prevent the next Mid Staffs scandal or, God forbid, the next Harold Shipman.
We burn with this passion because we know – and have known for 2,500 years – that knowledge is power in our war against disease and suffering.
Ever since Hippocrates started grouping symptoms into syndromes, the logical and scientific assessment of illness has been about the collection of data and its analysis.
We know that the life-saving demonstration of the association between smoking and lung cancer, which took Richard Doll and others 20 years, could be done at the touch of a button today, if we had well functioning electronic patient records.
We could make world-beating progress in research and in patient safety if we could get it right. This drives us on despite the technical, sociological and political hurdles we encounter.
We share a dream.
Time to turn dreams into words
Lacking King’s way with oratory, I want to enlist your help in finding a clarity of vision and a concise form of words that will help to move us forward.
I’m halfway through my term as CCIO Leaders Network advisory group chairman. We’ve had some success; there are more chief clinical information officers in place every month and we’ve had some very good events, including a great summer school.
But I believe that we need to take things to another level. I believe that recent government announcements of funding for health IT amount to a second National Programme for IT and this time it must be clinically led, or it will fail again.
I believe health secretary Jeremy Hunt and NHS England share our dream, but it isn’t yet clear that the government /NHS England realise the essential role of CCIOs.
With so much at stake, we can’t afford to wait for our betters to ‘get it’. We must build a comprehensive CCIO network that cannot be ignored. We must build it without any government funding if necessary.
So, what I would like to ask you to do is to help us to prepare a statement of intent – or manifesto if you like – written for and by the CCIO Leaders Network as a coalition of the passionately interested, the vanguard of the information revolution.
Put your suggestions in the comments section below. We will attempt to synthesise your thoughts into a document for discussion in time for the second CCIO Leaders Network Annual Conference, which takes place alongside EHI Live 2013 in November.
Be as practical as you want. But don’t be afraid to dream.
Our chance to change our world
Martin Luther King said: “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
“He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say: ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well’.”
We are called to build a network of CCIOs to deliver the dream we share. Let’s make this network the best we can. A CCIO in every hospital, in every clinical commissioning group, in every city and county. A CCIO for every patient.
Make your mark.
Joe McDonald
Joe McDonald is a practising NHS consultant psychiatrist. Over the past five years he has been an NHS trust medical director and national clinical lead for IT at NHS Connecting for Health – a stint that included 18 months as medical director of the Lorenzo delivery team!
His experiences in the National Programme for IT in the NHS have left him with a passion for usability and "end user knowledge networks.” He is the founding chairman of the National Mental Health Informatics Network. Motto: we don’t get fooled again. Follow him on twitter @CompareSoftware