Chief Operating Officer, Peter Noble
Friday October 30, 2020
I’m delighted to join Newcastle Health Innovation Partners (NHIP). It is a wonderful achievement securing national accreditation, which has been long overdue and so congratulations to the leadership team for pulling this off and to everyone in the research community. In your role and unique way, you’ve helped to change people’s lives and improve population health.
In preparing for the interview I was provided with the NHIP accreditation submission and was struck by its quality in breadth and depth. The vision for NHIP is quite simple – to improve the health of the population in NE England and Cumbria. At the interview, I described two worlds. In one world we are pushing back the frontiers of science, driving innovation and people are living longer, but in the other world we are sadly leaving some people behind. I was particularly struck on how the interview panel has a burning passion to bring the local population to levels of health enjoyed by the rest of the UK.
I have passed through the North East many times, occasionally staying for sport and music. Sadly my last painful memory was watching the demolition of Manchester United at St James Park, last October. It would have been hard to believe then, that I would be working in Newcastle and part of the partnership.
So, where to start? My thoughts are:
1. To rapidly gather and understand the activities, ambitions and needs of NHIP partner organisations, particularly how NHIP can deliver new value, greater than the sum of its parts
2. To help support and build an operational plan across the partnership to improve population health
3. As David Burn highlighted in his blog – good communication will be critical to the success of the partnership and so it will be important how we communicate the relevance and impact of our work across the North East community as it punches its weight – nationally and internationally.
There is a saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast and while resourcing, plans, infrastructure, initiative and metrics are important our real success is how as individuals and teams connect and engage for the greater good. It is just as much as how we work, to what we do, as we strive to motivate individuals and teams to go that extra mile and make the North East a better place.