In 2006, I had the honour to set up the Yorkshire Stroke Research Network. The previous year, a team of enthusiasts from Bradford had won the right to host this new organisation. Led by Professor Anne Forster, they were determined to improve the delivery of research across the county and, in the process, improve the lives of people with stroke and their carers. Somehow they found themselves selecting a research manager who knew lots about systems and, frankly, nothing about stroke.
The learning curve was steep and the pressure was high. But we did well. We were the first network in the country to recruit a full complement of staff. Then, bit by bit, we started to achieve our targets. We opened more studies in sites unused to stroke research and we recruited more and more patients every week. After a year or so I started to feel like I knew what I was doing.
From the start, one of the most interesting parts of my job was working with our user group of patients and carers. It gave meaning to a working life that largely consisted of staring at spreadsheets and filling in forms. I'd look forward to our meetings and, on this occasion, I was delighted to hand out graphs of impressive recruitment figures, expecting a pat on the back.
As I finished my presentation, there was a pause and then one of our more senior members cleared his throat to speak. Due to the effects of his stroke, it took a couple of tries for him to get out a few, precise, carefully chosen words, but we waited quietly and patiently until, in a broad Yorkshire accent he said, simply, "That's all well and good lad, but what good ever comes of it?"
What good ever comes of it?
What good ever comes of it?
Seriously? Isn't it obvious?
What good ever comes of it?
The words seemed to echo around the room. I grappled for an answer, but all I could come up with were abstract ideas about the greater good or improving knowledge. I tried to talk about science progressing slowly. But I floundered. Why? Because the question was really something else. The question was much more pertinent to me. The question he wanted an answer to was really, "What good ever comes of you?"
I realised that day that I was going about my work the wrong way and the patients I was supposed to be serving could tell. I was doing the right things, for the greater good, to improve science, to progress our knowledge. But I was doing them for the wrong reasons. I was chasing targets, when I should have been trying to create a great service for patients.
That day was the day I chose a new path. Over the next few years I studied service improvement and built a team that tried to build services that delivered for patients. It worked. We delivered great research to every organisation in our region and as a consequence, we hit all our targets. We also won awards for our work, including one for public involvement, which our user group was proud to collect on our behalf.
I'm now a research manager responsible for a large portfolio of work and I'm in demand for my service improvement skills across the country. I'm much better at what I do and much happier in my work precisely because I learned to listen the patients I was there to serve, even if, sometimes, I didn't enjoy what they had to say.
And, for the record, if anyone asks me what good ever comes of it (or me) today, I'd give them a damn good answer.
"Stephen Lock is a Research Delivery Manager for CRN: Yorkshire & the Humber. He is regional lead for Continuous Improvement, a fellow of the Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy and a member of the NIHR CRN's national Accelerating Digital Programme team."