At the start of my final year of university I had to make a rather big decision. I had to decide on a career. It took a lot of time searching around and deciding which graduate schemes I wanted to apply for. Then I found the NHS graduate management training scheme. What drew me to the scheme was the efforts it went to in order to portray an accurate reflection of what the scheme was like and the challenges the NHS is facing. There was no hiding away from the challenges and no acceptance that more of the same was what was needed.
I have family in the NHS and keep updated with the news so I was under no illusion that it would be an easy ride or that it would be a job you can just pick up and put down, that’s not how the NHS works. But it meant I knew what the workforce was like and I knew the good that it did on a consistent basis, and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to be a part of it – so I applied.
Issues like Mid Staffordshire were taught to us in great detail when we started the scheme, as was the £20bn funding gap, and that’s when things really hit home as it’s a necessary truth to digest and overcome. To me that’s one of the greatest strengths of the NHS: the culture of learning and improvement.
As a finance trainee, my scheme is 31 months long (other specialities have a 24-month scheme), and I’m coming to the end of it now. It’s been a fantastic experience including three different placements and a two-month secondment to an external company, but it’s never a dull experience. The NHS moves on at too fast a pace to have normal days that repeat themselves, there are constant opportunities to get involved in different pieces of work.
I’ve worked in a variety of roles to gain experiences, which allow you to branch out into lots of different career directions, but at the moment I’m leaning towards a future within the income teams. They produce internal data to report on activity, income and performance – this allows you to manipulate data to demonstrate changes in delivery of a service and for you to work alongside clinical divisions to help change the service.
Other tools such as service line reporting, at a basic level, allow you to track patient level information to drive out best practice and investigate reasons for different clinical treatments. Tools like this can be an extremely powerful way of demonstrating reasons for change and for tracking planned changes. Using data in this way has been something that I’ve always been interested in and it can have a fantastic clinical impact so I think this is where my next NHS role may lie.
Ultimately, though, I’m still unsure where I want to end up; the only thing I do know is that it will be within healthcare and that one day I’ll be able to look back and use the experiences of beginning my career at the NHS’s most challenging moment to move past anything. I’m just glad I’ve always liked a challenge.
• Stephen Lowis, a strategic development manager, started on the NHS graduate management training scheme in September 2012
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