This year’s theme is ''Invest in women: Accelerate progress’.
On International Women’s Day, Nina Nugent, Programme Lead for the Greater Manchester Diagnostics Network shares her thoughts.
I am immensely proud to work for the NHS and the investment it makes into allowing women to accelerate their careers and make progress. Through this investment I have been able to progress to the role I have today at a regional level, leading an innovation that will help provide better care for our patients.
I started my NHS career in 2009 as a project manager with a newly formed Quality Improvement team at Salford Royal Hospital, which is part of the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust. Prior to this I had worked in TV production, so the NHS was a whole new ball game! The aim of my first project was to implement new models of change management to improve the quality of services for our patients. I was fortunate enough to work with so many different teams across the Trust and supported large scale change collaboratives such as the Care of the Acutely Unwell Adult. This allowed me to gain the skills I needed to progress.
Through my work in quality improvement, I also became a LEAN practitioner and facilitated teams through the LEAN process, where we also started to work with non-clinical teams. I was so grateful for this experience, as I was able to learn about the work in other areas of the hospital.
I made the move over to Pennine Acute (as it was in 2018) as I was keen to work slightly closer to home after getting married and starting a family, all of which was supported by the NHS, quite literally as all our children have been born in Royal Oldham Hospital!
Since then, I have worked in various operational roles, which has allowed me to gain the skills and knowledge to move forward with my career. I was also given the opportunity to complete a number of professional qualifications including Managing Successful Programmes.
Most recently I have been seconded from a Directorate Manager’s position to take on the new challenge of working with primary care colleagues to get better access to certain radiology exams. I am so excited about this new project and keen to build relationships with colleagues across Greater Manchester.
The quality of care we deliver and the improvement of services for our patients has always been a top priority in all the roles I have taken, and I am grateful for the opportunity to help make a difference be it small or not!
The work that we do at the Greater Manchester Diagnostic Network is so hugely important to this, not just from the digital aspect, as the team here are really at the forefront of some of the most complex digital programmes in the NHS but the collaboration that it takes to get there is key to all of it.
I am so appreciative of the NHS and to play my small part in keeping it moving and improving. To all the fabulous women I have worked with over the past 15 years, pat yourself on the back today or in true NHS style have a cuppa, you deserve it.