Starting on the 3 October 2022, meeting 10 Clinical Education Improvement Fellows (CEIF) and 2 RePAIR fellows (Reducing Pre-registration Attrition and Improving Retention) under the Florence Nightingale Fellowship programme 2022-2023 was a fantastic beginning to another career milestone for each of us. 

With Academic steering from Canterbury Christ Church University and the wider Health Education England platform guiding us, we felt really supported from the outset.

This quote loomed large as we got to network and set stepping stones for our onward journey of this exciting venture. It goes without saying that breaking the ice in a new group takes time and effort and without further ado Lucy Brown and Jess Sainsbury (Research and Policy Associate) got us off the mark.

It sometimes takes more than just a Jo-Hari window to open doors into other peoples lives and the use of MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ) gave each of a biting point to harness our conversations, fostering trust, confidentiality, respect, and inclusiveness in the group.

We shared our hopes as a Cohort and agreed to keep in touch as a group via social media and face to face, thereby strengthening our leadership signatures.
Rebecca Tyrrell, Regional Head of Allied Health Professions welcomed the cohort and we got busy listening to the 2021/22 fellows’ exemplar work achieved in the last year.

We concluded the day with an engaging conversation with Professor Chris Burton and overseen by Lucy Brown, Director of Nursing and Midwifery Leadership Development who overarched the days’ events, edging each of us to dive deeper into our MBTI results, going forwards.

On the 11 and 17 October, our introduction to the powers of networking using Twitter was a technical experience for some of us as we got into the digital world via two webinars by WeCommunities Co-Founder, Nick Chinn. Our confidence in social media grew by the day listening to Nick, who helped explain the intricacies of Twitter, quite tacitly.

Further digitalization of our studentship with Canterbury Christ Church University systems was sealed by giving each of us university IT access and support via the academic steering group, planning for a yearlong timetable, interspersed with regular supervision.

Thanks to Pooja Rabheru, who introduced the concept of using a Padlet which has proven invaluable for us to graze our thoughts as a group and share resources.

The rest of October gained momentum as we brainstormed about scoping, mapping, and letting out ideas on paper, forum, and social media, reflecting on the KTA (knowledge to action framework), helping find stakeholders in our contextual project areas using the 9-sector stakeholder mapping analysis and re-framing the possible impacts of our projects.

Looking towards early November, the idea of a ‘talking head video’ pitching our projects in less than 1 minute was a pleasant challenge, shifting the pace from ‘novice’ to ‘amateur’ just like the changing colors of autumn leaves – It’ll be here before you notice it; as each of us got underway projecting our plans to capture a wider audience.

Let’s watch this space to find out…………….in ‘just a minute’.

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