General

Prioritising the Needs of the Many: Great communicators let the message do the talking

girlymicro Education, General, Science Communication

Let me start by saying that I am by no way a ‘great communicator’. I’m OK, I’ve never been the one who wins best presentation prizes or anything like that. I have however had the privilege of seeing some truly amazing communicators speak. I’ve also sat through more hours than I’d care to mention of bad conversations,  bad presentations and bad interviews. What these combined experiences have shown me is that truly great communicators focus on the message and not how they want you to perceive them. They let the listener feel like they own the communication and thereby feel like the message is personal to them. They make the audience feel valued and like they matter by creating a shared experience.

We can’t all be great at this, it’s not where everyones skill set aligns. The greats also seem to me to have a bit of magic that probably can’t be taught. For the rest of us mere mortals however there are things we can do, in terms of thinking and preparation, that may make us a little bit better. So what can we do differently?

It’s not about appearing to be the smartest person in the room

We’ve all been there. We’ve probably all reviewed papers or seen talks where the communicator focused on appearing smart rather than the message. They used complex sentences and words to demonstrate just how much of a scientist they are. In some ways it feels like they have done just about everything they can to make it harder to engage with their message, by making it clear that most of the audience isn’t smart enough to understand what it is they are trying to convey.

In fact the real skill with highly complex topics is being able to present them in a way where they don’t feel complex at all. Being able to break down a complex topic into pieces that when combined make the whole process understandable can only be achieved if you yourself really understand your subject. It’s why Feyman utilised trying to teach something as a way to better understand his learning gaps.

Working out what your message is

Before you start the process of breaking down what you want to teach and going into detail you really need to start with the message.  Too many of us when we are trying to plan a lesson or lecture, or even a paper, don’t put in the pre work to think about what it is that we are actually trying to communicate.  What story are we trying to tell.  We don’t often think of communicating science as telling a story but in reality we are, and there is lots to be gained from thinking of it in terms of these structures.  A story has a key theme or message that it is trying to be communicated to the audience.  Stories also build, they are comprised of sections, even if these are simply: a beginning, a middle and an end.  Before starting to communicate we should therefore think the same way about the topic we are trying to get someone to take away.  We can make sure that everything else we talk about comes back to and enforces this key message. 

The next thing is to then flesh out this message by planning learning objectives.  What are the 3 – 5 things you would hope that someone who has attended will be able to know/achieve after they leave.  These effectively are used to give you your beginning, middle and end.  Your learning objectives for sessions delivered to different audiences may be at a high level the same i.e. raise awareness of the work of a microbiologist. In order to maximise their effectiveness however you will need to tailor them for different audiences to ensure that they can be achieved i.e. talking about AMR will be different for lay pubic audiences versus researchers. This is where the specific and relevant components really come into play.  Everything you put into your session should be based around these learning outcomes in order to support the audience have a clear sense of direction with your overall message.

Remember who your audience are

If your message is going to land then designing your way of communicating it and the learning objectives with them in mind is key.  If you have an audience of 4 year olds then your method of communication is going to be very different to if you are talking to a room full of post graduate PhD students.  If you have a drop in 15 minutes with a large group at a science outreach stand you will need to have a very different method to if you have a small group for an hour as part of a workshop.  You also need to bear in mind whether these audiences are ones you have a relationship with because they’ve met you before, or are they a one off encounter.

When you are writing items like lay summaries for research grants and papers this is especially important.  Most lay summaries should be aimed at an audience with a reading age of 12.  You need to be very conscious of abbreviations and scientific terms that we may all use without even thinking about them.  There are some good websites that can be used to check wording and language, but even more simply you could ask a member of your family (or even ideally a lay focus group) to read through it and see what the message is that they take away vs the one you think they will take away. The same is true for verbal presentations as well. Think about the language you use and whether it invites the audience in or acts as a barrier for engagement.

Try out a metaphor or two

I’m presenting tonight at an AMR event and I have one slide to talk about my work.  The audience is likely to be mixed and I want to talk about the differences between phenotypic, fragment based sequencing and whole genome sequencing, and how different techniques are best in different circumstances. These are challenging concepts to describe in under 5 minutes and so I’ve picked something I think most people will be familiar with for them to hook their knowledge onto…………cake. A good metaphor puts your audience at ease as you are discussing something familiar. You are also able to take shortcuts in explaining some concepts as you are hooking new knowledge onto a pre-existing framework. Hopefully your audience will walk away with your message and if you’re really lucky as someone they will remember.

Take it one step at a time

No one wants to sit in a talk and feel lost or read an article that makes them feel stupid for not understanding it. It makes the person engaging feel bad about themselves. It also makes them disengage which can be distracting for the audience as a whole, depending on how they behave when it happens. I’ve been that person in immunology talks at conferences. I’ve been fully engaged and listening for 15 minutes and then the presenter either takes a step assuming knowledge I don’t have or I blink for a second and miss something and I spend the next 30 minutes with no idea what on earth is going on playing with my phone.

The lesson for me here is twofold. Make sure that every progression step your audience needs is present, you can rarely make assumptions about your audience. If the information is key to understanding the information to come, make sure you give it however briefly. This is where we come back to knowing your message and learning outcomes. By only having the info in your session that is essential to serve those you buy yourself time to spend on the blocks of info needed. The second lesson is to make sure you refer back to previous building blocks of info in your talk. That means that if someone misses something they are given a repeat opportunity to contextualise and understand prior to you moving on. It also means that you are embedding the previous knowledge because the next step builds upon it.

Know when to present yourself vs your CV

Connection between yourself and the audience is always key to getting your message across. There are times when, as much as I wish it wasn’t, that standing in front of an audience as a living version of your CV is required in order to be taken seriously. When establishing your credentials before you start communicating is key to your message being heard. At these moments I’m Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green who leads X and has Y amount of research funding. When you are trying to speak in a lot of other settings however it’s important to remember that credentials can in fact get in the way of the message you are trying to present. Remember it’s about the message and not about you. If I stand in front of audience to talk about science being for everyone and reel off my list of fellowships and leadership roles I have immediately moved myself into a box of ‘other’. Someone not necessarily like them, someone with different professional experience who doesn’t share their experiences and aspirations, someone that it is hard to connect with. When doing sessions like these I’m definitely not my CV, I’m Elaine or Girlymicro.

The best way to get better is to practice

As I’ve said I encounter people all the time who are so much better at all of this than I am and I’m always super attentive when I hear them speak, not just to hear their message but to also learn ways to do it better myself. There are obviously some people out there who are born great at this, but even they needed to learn and improve how they did it. The best way to do that is to practice. Write blogs and get involved in writing papers with others who you think are good at this. Try out thinking about messaging and designing learning objectives, until it becomes easier because you’re used to it. Most importantly practice talking to people, practice one on one conversations with those you supervise, with your colleagues who are in different disciplines and with your friends. See what bits interest them, which bits they respond to. Be brave and book in to do some outreach and volunteer to give that departmental seminar you’ve been dreading. Doing is in essence how we learn, you can only get so far by reading about something. Once you’ve had a go its then important to take the time to reflect in order to learn how to do it better next time.

The other key part of practicing and learning how to communicate better is to make sure that you are building evaluation into your sessions/activities. We often try to guess at what well, what audiences actually heard and what we could improve upon. Guessing is fine to a point but you will never have the backgrounds of everyone you are engaging with. The only way to really know what they are responding to, what worked well and what didn’t is to actually ask them. This is where the measurable part of your learning objectives is important. As scientists we respond well to data, it gives us concrete direction in which to improve. Lets apply that to the way we communicate so that we make the most of every opportunity, every moment, in order to succeed in getting our message across.

All opinions on this blog are my own

An Homage to Douglas Adams: Reaching 42 and therefore becoming the answer to life the universe and everything

girlymicro General

I’ve been lucky enough to make it to the big 42 this year. 10 years more than my sister and according to the wise, funny and wonderful Douglas Adams the number which is the answer to life the universe and everything. So as an homage to this great writer and to celebrate I thought I would share the knowledge I have gained whilst turning this wonderful number.

It will never make sense, that’s part of what makes it brilliant

When I was a kid I thought that adults knew it all. When I was a teenager and in my 20s I thought I knew it all, whilst simultaneously knowing I was out of my depth and knew nothing. In my 30s I felt like I needed to know it all and put myself under all the pressure that came with that to succeed and to be seen as knowing. Now I’ve reached my 40s I’ve realised that one of the biggest joys is in the not knowing and enjoying that there is still so much more to learn, explore and achieve.

Its not about how fast you get there, its about remembering to enjoy the ride

I spent my 20s and 30s racing towards an imaginary finish line. I had a list of tick boxes and I ticked fast and I ticked hard. Having reached my imaginary line I now realise that the joy was mostly in the journey and not in the completion. I know a lot of people right now in the ticking phase and the thing I most wish they knew was the boxes WILL get ticked, but that they should get the most from ticking them. Sit back and smell the roses, feel the sun and enjoy the pleasure of each achievement for its own sake, rather than immediately looking towards the next.

In a world where you can be anything, be kind

I don’t remember the smartest people, I don’t remember the people who had the most experience or the most knowledge. The people I remember for having the most impact on me and my career are the ones who were kind. The ones who took the time, the ones who lifted me when I stumbled and the ones who had faith in me when I had none in myself. If you want to maximise the impact of your time on this planet then being kind is the way to do it. Be kind when it’s the last thing you want to be, be kind to the people who are pulling you down. People are fighting battles you know nothing about and one act of kindness can change a day or life.

Not everyone will like you and that’s OK

I find this truth hard as I am, by nature, a people pleaser but its true. No matter how hard you work, no matter how hard you try, not everyone is going to love or even like you. That’s ok you won’t love everyone either, the key thing is to not let that drive you. I’ve been described as ‘marmite’ and it taken me some time to grasp the fact that someone doesn’t have to like me to work with me, we just have to set differences aside and find enough common ground to focus on a shared goal for a time. Not everyone needs to be a tea and cake buddy.

Understand what aids you and let the rest of it go

Sadly I don’t think anyone gets this far in life without having some challenges and quite frankly dealing with some shit. These are the fires that forge us. The thing is knowing that those fights and struggles that have got you here have made you who you are, honour that but don’t let it define you. It’s all too easy to carry our scars with a little too much pride and to give them a little too much weight in our present. I’ve learnt to acknowledge the drive they have given me, the armour they have provided, to try and take the good but leave the bad. To let them help make me but not to let them tell me who I am.

Understand what matters to you

What matters changes over time, it isn’t always a static state of being and requires regular reflection. I’m often described as driven but I mostly think that’s a nice way of people saying I’m following my own path, all I do is put one foot in front of the other. What I do know is that there is a continuous signal amongst the noise of my life and that is that what matters most to me is my family. The people I love are my world, they are my centre and keep me grounded. They are the calm in my storm. What I want most is time with them and to live my life without drama, I did ALL the drama in my teens and early 20s and I don’t enjoy it.

My husband and I have a phrase that we use with each other ‘let me just check my bothered pocket’. When I’m getting into a shame spiral when I’m panicking about the conversation I had yesterday or the imagined upset I might have caused him or visa versa it’s a phrase we use to bring some reality back. The answer is almost always ‘its entirely empty’. Everything is almost always completely OK and there is almost always nothing to worry about. This simple phrase grounds me and enables me to focus on what matters most, the people I love.

The struggles you feel now will fade and change into new and different ones

You have probably gathered that I’m not a very chilled out person, as my husband says ‘my mind is a hell to me’. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt is to step back when I’m in the midst of my storm to try to get the distance to understand whether this is something that actually really matters. The ability I have to focus and be tunnel visioned is great to achieve tasks but is somewhat of a hinderance in this and it’s something that I have to practice. I sit and ask myself if the worst case is true would this matter in the way it feels now next week? next month? next year? in ten years? By asking myself these questions I give myself the structure to work out quite how important it is, or if in fact it is not important at all. This also helps me choose the battles that I want to engage in and the ones that I’m happy to walk away from.

Finding your tribe makes it all worth it

We talk a lot about making sure that you have insight from beyond your echo chamber, and this is true. Right now though I’m going to talk about the joy of finding people who just get you, people who are part of your tribe. None of us are strong all the time, none of us can always be our own advocate. Life is an exhausting merry-go-round and sometimes we all need help. Find the people that see you for who you truly are, good and bad, and who like/love you anyway. Find the people who will see your worth even when you can’t and who will lift you when you fall. Once you have them life will never be quite the same as you will be able to share the load. Once you find them never let them go.

Have the courage to choose the unconventional path

We spend a lot of time getting told what should matter to us, where we should want to be, who we should want to be with. I’ve never been very good with instructions. I’m a strong believer in ‘you do you’ as long as what you are doing isn’t hurting others or taking away their right to choose the same way. I don’t really believe in doing things the way others have done them. I’m the only one that wears this skin, I’m the only me, therefore only I can choose the right path for me. Being different, being you takes courage and self belief, but it’s worth it. Choose the right path for you, otherwise you’ll spend your whole life questioning what might have been and that’s a cage that’s hard to escape from.

Travel the road using the 3 Ps and you won’t go far wrong

The 3 Ps are my rules I set myself to live by: purpose, passion and principles. They apply across my professional and personal life. Do the things that make you wake in the morning with a smile on your face, do them consciously and in a way that doesn’t hurt others. For me, if I live by the 3 Ps I don’t question my life choices because I’m following a path, no matter how challenging, that I’ve set on because I believe in it. When life gets hard therefore, and believe me it does, I know at the core of my being why I made the decision I did and it makes it easier to carry on. These Ps are mine but you have a whole alphabet of choice to decide on what your guiding stars might be!

All opinions on this blog are my own

I’m Not Lucky, I’m a Badass: The importance of owning your success

girlymicro General

It’s Heathcare Science Week 2022 and I wanted to start the week by posting about something very close to my heart – owning it. I believe very strongly that we should own our failures and use them as learning experiences to make us better. I also believe that we should own our successes, but this is something that I struggle more with getting comfortable with.

Like many people my first response to any form of compliment linked to my career and the success (I feel) I’ve had is to say how lucky I’ve been. This is true, I’ve been incredibly fortunate, I’ve had amazing opportunities and great success. The thing is,  I’ve been thinking recently is this luck? Is it luck or is it because of hard work, tenacity and opportunities made?

The other thing is this. Claiming success and owning it as anything other than luck is a thought process that makes me feel uncomfortable. Not just that but I’ve worked in teams with some amazing people in order to achieve it and so is it mine to own? Just privately thinking how good my success make me feel also makes me realise how much acknowledging that openly would not be a good look. It could be seen as being arrogant. Being considered arrogant we are taught is never a good thing, especially as a woman.

Then I saw the tweet below and it really made me stop and think. What is the problem with us owning our success and the work it took to get there. Is being happy with your success really arrogance? Or is it, in reality, about having the confidence to own it?

Where Does the Fear of Owning Your Success Come From?

Working in healthcare means that very little we achieve is as individuals, we work in teams and I think most of us are very aware of team dynamics. We succeed and fail within those teams and therefore I think it is often difficult to see ourselves as individuals and having individual success within those team dynamics. Now I’m not in anyway saying we shouldn’t be good team players, I’m all about collaboration but I do think it’s OK to recognise your own role in the success that your team has and to be OK with acknowledging that (with due credit given to others). It takes a lot of voices to make a chorus after all.

My evolutionary psychology days are some time ago, but when I think of how we are taught lessons linked to pride and arrogance I always think back to my days studying primate behaviour. Group behaviour, especially female group behaviour, is about co-operation and fitting into hierarchy. Essentially it’s about helping others and not sticking out. Females that stick out make themselves available for conflict and are considered to be challenging the hierarchy. Now, I haven’t studied in this area for a long time but it feels like a lot of our early behavioural lessons are still based on this structure and if, like me, you are not very comfortable with conflict then your position should be ‘to be seen and not heard’.

I was told repeatedly as a child that ‘Pride comes before a fall’. It was drummed into me from a young age that pride/arrogance was a sin and to be frank it just wasn’t a good look. This definitely plays into, or maybe is, part of the source of my imposter syndrome – where I believe that people actually believe I’m not very good at what I do and the only reason I’m here is that people are being kind to me. If you put those two things together you end up with a belief system where you know that being prideful could lead you to screwing up and embarrassing yourself AND that others may cease to like you and so you may also be called out as not being very good. The pressure we place on ourselves to be liked in order to succeed may therefore itself get in the way of us owning the very success it creates.

Confidence is a tool. Arrogance is a weapon. Confidence invites people in and arrogance pushes people away. People use arrogance as a wall to prevent others from challenging them. 

Amy Cuddy 2018

You all know I’m a bit of an Amy Cuddy fangirl and I like the quote above. We live in fear of being considered prideful or arrogance but that is different from being confident. Confidence builds trust, it enables others to feel they are in a safe pair of hands. To me the big difference between confidence and arrogance is how it deals with failure. People who are confident acknowledge their failures and failings and use them as a learning tool, whereas those who display arrogance are about denying weaknesses and failures and therefore don’t learn from encounters. I for one need to accept these differences between arrogance and confidence, acknowledge that there is a fine line to walk, but know that if I don’t display confidence I am doing myself and others a dis-service. Owning my successes is part of this.

Changing Your Mindset

There is a certain irony in trying to work on this at a time when my I’ve been feeling particularly stressed and anxious and therefore my imposter syndrome has been on over drive. I’m working on the internal validation piece in order to see my own self worth but I’m also really glad of some of the external recognition I receive which aids me in benchmarking in a more neutral way. Some of that is from twitter, awards, committee work etc. All of it is important to me as it stops me getting too much into my own head, I think this is something that people who don’t have a strong critical voice struggle to understand. At the same time as needing this validation to help me manage at the moment I struggle to respond all the nice things people say as I don’t want to come off the wrong way. It’s also hard to know how loud to shout about things like grant success as others who are struggling could be placed in a more challenging head space if this information isn’t shared in the right way.

In order to make the leap into owning my success therefore I’ve needed to work out how to change my mindset #workinprogress. Some of this is linked to being in a safe space where you can try on and practice some of the changes in order to feel comfortable. As I’ve decided that a lot of the barriers to me owning my success are linked to my imposter syndrome it’s been important to practice this within the aspects of my role where I feel more confident first. It’s also been important to look at how others are doing this in public spaces, how do they share in a way that is inspirational not challenging?

The biggest shift for me has been trying to move from a position where the best thing to do is not be seen to ‘rub others faces in it by talking about success’ to ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. As leaders if others can’t see what we are managing to achieve how are we supporting the aspirations of those following behind us? How are we supporting them to dream bigger than we ever have? I’ve given myself permission to be seen by others.

Women often suffer from being said to display arrogance when displaying confidence when if they were male this would be seen as a more positive character trait. That is something that is not going to go away and I for one am not someone who feels confident enough to challenge it on a daily basis. I am however going to be purposeful in owning things linked to me and my success, not in a way to discourage others but as a way to empower them and help us all to shine. My pledges for 2022 are therefore to:

  • Be open about my successes and not hide them from others
  • Not agonise about posting things linked to success on social media
  • Amplify others successes by sharing them, talking about them and congratulating them
  • Encourage others to challenge themselves by talking about routes that I have undertaken which have been successful (and also where I haven’t) to support those coming after me
  • Stop down playing my own successes by defaulting to luck narrative

Our success does not diminish others, it gives us all permission to shine, so pledge like me to own your success and support others in choosing paths to their own. From now on when someone congratulates me I will not respond with ‘thank you, I’ve been so very lucky’ I will respond with ‘thank you, its been a brilliant journey’ and maybe if I’m feeling strong ‘thank you, turns out I’m a bit of a badass!’

All opinions on this blog are my own

How Do We Stop, When the Person We Are Competing Against is Ourselves?

girlymicro Academic Life, General, Healthcare Science

I’ve talked a lot previously about the fact that we should only really compete with ourselves. We are all different as are our lives and therefore it makes sense that all of our success criteria will be different too. It’s too tempting to bench mark against others and find yourself wanting. This can be a great driver but it is also something that I for one find difficult some days as I don’t know if it can be turned on and off.

Three years ago today I ended up in a cast from shoulder to wrist. I fell out of a lift at work and protected my work laptop and phone and failed somewhat to protect myself. I’d never broken anything before and so was convinced I’d just sprained something (despite not being able to straighten my arm). I therefore took ibuprofen and paracetamol, went to three more meetings and told everyone I’d be back on Monday – this was a Friday morning. On Saturday morning I was forced to admit that maybe there was something wrong and finally went to A & E (after checking my emails). There I was told I broken my elbow and that I’d have a fracture clinic appointment in the week. I shrugged and said well it’s only and elbow and so worked from home as that didn’t mean I couldn’t type……..right. I finally turned up at fracture clinic and I had broken not only my elbow but also my wrist and then put a full arm cast on me and signed me off sick for 6 weeks. I’d never had a sick note before, I hyperventilated in the appointment and burst into tears saying that they couldn’t do it. They pointed out they could, insisted I took codeine for the pain and put me in the hands of my friend to take me home. What’s my point? My point is that that I don’t know when to stop. I was told by multiple people I should have gone to A & E on the day. I was told by many more to go home and not go to meetings? My husband was adamant that I was in pain and shouldn’t work prior to the fracture clinic as I had a broken arm. I made my wrist much worse and heal out of alignment because I typed on it for almost a week because I couldn’t stop.

So how do we stop when the person who is driving us to continue is ourselves?

I posted last week about the fact that I am often not that well, in fact today I am writing this post in bed as I just feel pretty rough. I’m used to needing to push through because if I didn’t I wouldn’t ever achieve anything very much. What’s probably worse is that I think I’m a fundamentally lazy person. Honestly if I could I would lie on a chaise longue in a library all day reading books and drinking tea. As I’m painfully aware of this aspect of my personality I do try (although my hubby may point out not always successfully) to counter it by being pro-active about doing things. The combination of these two mean that I don’t often know when it’s OK to take my foot off the gas and rest and when I need to knuckle down and push on.

There are times when this is useful

There are times when not knowing when to stop is actually useful. Pre-pandemic I used to run, badly. I’m not good at it, I’m not fast. What I am is stubborn. I continue to put one foot in front of the other no matter what. I’ve finished marathons and half marathons with blood up to calves and enormous holes in my feet but I get into a zone where I just put one foot in front of the other and the pain doesn’t matter so much.

When it comes to working in healthcare I find the same thing happens mentally as well as physically, you just keep going. No matter what the warning signs in terms of burn out of physical health, you keep going because that’s what we do. My auto immune condition entered a whole new phase when I was doing my PhD and I’d just finished a half marathon (whilst in my 3rd year of PhD) when my husband noticed I’d lost a patch of my hair. None of it stopped me. I still submitted my PhD a year early so I could do FRCPath and complete my consultant training.

I succeeded because I just pushed on, because of the habit of putting one foot in front of another. At the time finishing was everything, now I wonder if there were more sensible ways and if I should have listened to those around me, but I was on mile 9 (which I hate) and I just wanted to get the equivalent of mile 13.

Medicine and healthcare are hard places to break the habit

I work in an amazing organisation, filled with the most amazing people. They are all also super smart and world leading experts. I’ve worked there for almost 18 years, I trained there, I’ve grown into an adult there. Being surrounded by people that smart, that successful becomes an embedded driver in itself. You want to succeed for yourself but you also want to succeed for them. As someone who thrives on doing things differently I wanted to follow my own path, break glass ceilings and set the way. To do that however you have to succeed, you have to tick the boxes that people think you can’t tick and so you have to find the drive to continue even when it feels impossible.

As a Healthcare Scientist there is track that needs completing in order to reach the consultant end point I was determined to achieve, for me it was supposed to look something like this:

  • Masters (years 1 – 3)
  • State registration (year 4)
  • Membership of the Royal College of Pathologists (year 4)
  • PhD (years 5 – 10)
  • Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists (year 11)

Even though I’ve talked about not benchmarking against others the need to complete these goals become embedded in your psyche. You become very focussed on the track that you are on, in the same way that I run, you get into the zone and take one step at a time. Sometimes however when you are in that zone it’s hard to hear the voices that say you could do it differently, that you could take a break between stages, that you could take that afternoon off to refresh. In my case it was hard because I was on fixed term contracts for the first 13 years of my career, until after I had my PhD and FRCPath. There was therefore a ticking clock in my brain that if I didn’t demonstrate enough commitment, get enough done, that I would lose my job and a career I loved. Not only was I competing against myself but I was competing against time.

So how do we stop?

All of this drive has definitely had its benefits, as I said there are times when this self-competition is really helpful. I would not have managed to get a consultant post or tick all the boxes that needed ticking without it. The issue is that how do you stop when it is no longer useful or even harmful?

I’m still working on this one but here are some things that I’ve found useful. The first one being is to listen to the balancing voices. There’s a lot of good in social media but it’s sometimes easy to only hear the things that re-enforce the fact that we should be working harder and doing more. There are other voices out there however that should make you stop and think about whether you can stop and take a break or just do it in a different way altogether, try and pay as much attention to these as the ones that drive you to keep doing what you’re doing.

Think more about who you are listening to when getting face to face advice. The day I broke my arm at least 3 people told me to go to A and E. I knew something wasn’t right but I listened to others that re-enforced my inner voice to keep going. It was my friends and family who were the ones that said to stop, the ones who prioritise me over Dr Cloutman-Green. Do yourself a favour and listen to these people more. Their priority is you, not the roster, not the deadlines and not the work. Amplify their voices in your mind rather than listening to others.

Finally I’m trying to become my own critical friend. If I was giving advice to someone on the situation I find myself in, would I tell them to push on or would I tell them to stop and rest so they can come back stronger? This is definitely a skill and I am definitely at amateur level right now, but I am working on giving myself permission, permission to leave on time, permission to eat lunch and permission to do things I enjoy that have nothing to do with work. I know some of you out there are so much better than I am at this, and as I said, I am a work in progress. I’m trying to remember therefore to enjoy the learning and the journey. Life after all is just a ride.

All opinions on this blog are my own

When Heroes Fall: How the intersection between fandom and public health can change who you root for

girlymicro General, Science Communication

Today is the day, we have reached Super Bowl 56 and for those of you who know me well you will know how much I love Super Bowl Sunday. This year its the LA Rams up against the Cincinnati Bengals. We will be a divided household as the Rams are one of my secondary teams and my husband is a lifelong Bengals fan. Now I’ve been a big NFL fan for many years, after my husband introduced me to the game – I describe it as chess with violence. For all of this time I have supported the Green Bay Packers. Unlike in the Premiership because of the divisionary structure you can have secondary teams, such as my liking of the Rams, but the Cheese Heads have always had my heart. One of the reasons for this is because of the ethos of the team, they are owned by the community and include community service in all of their contracts, why oh why therefore would I be secretly quite glad that my team have not made it to the Super Bowl this year?

Who is Aaron Rogers and What Did He Do?

Aaron Rogers is the Quarter Back for the Green Bay Packers, in effect he is the leader of the team. He is currently on a 4 year contract valued at $134 million (remember this number when we talk fines later). In November 2021 it emerged that Aaron Rodgers had COVID-19. These things happen I hear you say, you can get COVID-19 even if vaccinated. All true, what also emerged linked to this however was the Aaron Rodgers had lied/obfuscated about being vaccinated for SARS CoV2. He had also followed NFL guidance for vaccinated players when unvaccinated, leading the Green Bay Packers to also not be compliant with NFL COVID-19 guidance.

The NFL COVID-19 guidance is:

If a vaccinated person tests positive and is asymptomatic, he or she will be isolated and contact tracing will promptly occur. The positive individual will be permitted to return to duty after two negative tests at least 24-hours apart and will thereafter be tested every two weeks or as directed by the medical staffs. Vaccinated individuals will not be subject to quarantine as a result of close contact with an infected person.

If an unvaccinated person tests positive, the protocols from 2020 will remain in effect. The person will be isolated for a period of 10 days and will then be permitted to return to duty if asymptomatic. Unvaccinated individuals will continue to be subject to a five-day quarantine period if they have close contact with an infected individual.

https://operations.nfl.com/updates/football-ops/2021-covid-related-operating-principles/

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s the learning from those mistakes that matters. However when it came out that Aaron Rogers had lied, instead of demonstrating learning he doubled down and used the coverage to talk about his scientific opinions and the research he had done. Again, I support people gathering information. When you gather that information from known discredited sources and use your platform to continue to spread that disinformation however I have an issue. So much so I tweeted about it and how it made me feel as both a scientist and a fan:

So What Did He Say?

Aaron Rogers admitted that he had misled others by avoiding or implying he was vaccinated when he had instead chosen to take a homeopathic approach to COVID-19. He appeared on a Friday night American talk show called The Pat McAfee Show in order to respond to the detail that had been released:

“I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and ability to make choices for your body: Not have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something. Health is not a one-size-fits-all for everybody.”

Aaron Rogers – The Pat McAfee Show

Rodgers then went on to say he had received monoclonal antibodies and taken ivermectin for his COVID-19 infection and went on to thank podcast host Joe Rogan – whose podcast has been criticised for spreading SARS CoV2 disinformation.

“I consulted with a now good friend of mine Joe Rogan, after he got Covid, and I’ve been doing a lot of stuff that he recommended,”

Aaron Rogers – The Pat McAfee Show

If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem

A lot of the science quoted by Rogers has been disproven time and time again and it wasn’t just me that was upset that he was spreading mis-information, even when challenged, under the guise of him ‘doing own research’:

When you are acting as a spokes person for information that has been shown to be incorrect then this isn’t a zero sum game. People who look up to you may not have the scientific knowledge or background to unpick what you are saying and challenge that information. Those same people may follow on and take up your advice and so your actions could actively result in harm. I feel this is especially true if you are an athlete and therefore you make money from sponsorship and other activities linked to your physical health, which could be viewed as being based in increased health knowledge/awareness.

It’s a matter of leadership

Quarter backs act as the leaders of their team, Rogers has been in the NFL for a long time and acts as one of it’s senior leaders. Whether you want it or not that position comes with a level of social responsibility. One of the reasons I fell in love with the Packers is that social responsibility is imbedded throughout the culture of the team. It is therefore even more jarring when the leader of such a team goes against that culture. During his interview Rogers even went on to state that his actions were themselves imbedded in his role as a leader:

Rogers claimed he had a “moral obligation to object to unjust rules and rules that make no sense.”

Aaron Rogers – The Pat McAfee Show

My issue with this statement is that if it was true then true leadership would have been standing up and owning your opinions and being open to challenge. He even went on to challenge the NFL and their medical team by saying he had been told that it was impossible to catch COVID-19 if you were vaccinated and it was this untruth that added to his lack of willingness to be vaccinated. The NFL however responded by saying:

“No doctor from the league or the joint NFL-NFLPA infectious disease consultants communicated with the player. If they had, they certainly would have never said anything like that.”

NFL statement on Aaron Rodgers’ claims about a doctor saying COVID-19 can’t be caught, transmitted by vaccinated players.

This interaction makes me question the response that states it was linked to leadership, as leadership to me does not lie well when linked to deceit.

This isn’t all about Rogers to me though. The Packers leadership has also been questionable. From statements made it is clear that they were aware of the way that Aaron was both feeling and behaving. When he came out with comments accusing the NFL or mis-leading scientific commentary the silence was deafening. Both Rogers and the Packers were fined linked to COVID compliance penalties: the Packers $300,000 and Rodgers was fined $14,650. Speaking of leadership however, how does that fine stand up as leadership? It is likely less than a weeks pay for Rogers and a drop in the ocean for the team. Leadership is linked to culture and if that culture allows the behaviour we’ve seen this year then I can’t help but be disappointed.

When you lie its not just you you put at risk, you remove the choice from others

Before the season started, Rodgers was asked if he had been vaccinated and he said he had been “immunized.” In the same answer, he said of unvaccinated players, “I’m not gonna judge those guys,” seeming to imply he had received the jab. Rodgers during his interview insisted he wasn’t lying in that answer, but conceded he didn’t want to answer more questions about vaccination.

“I wanted it to go away,” he admitted. “Everyone on the squad knew I was not vaccinated. Everyone in the organization knew I wasn’t vaccinated. I wasn’t hiding from anybody. I was trying to minimize and mitigate having this conversation going on and on.”

Aaron Rogers – The Pat McAfee Show

Medical information is personal and therefore it is not a matter that the public have the right to ‘know’, to be honest its none of my business as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t use it as a platform. There is a difference however between not getting drawn into a conversation about it and lying/misleading others. If he followed guidance for vaccinated individuals when he was unvaccinated that is deceit, and it is deceit that could have posed a risk to others. It is not the lie that matters as much as the actions that could have affected others. For instance he was filmed attending a party and other events and even on the side lines speaking to journalists where he breached guidelines for unvaccinated players. That means he knowingly put his team mates at risk, as well as risking the performance of the team as a whole if an outbreak had resulted. If the Packers leadership knew that makes it worse, but I remain to be convinced that everyone he exposed was actively consented into that exposure by knowing his status. I doubt he told the cleaners he interacted with, those who served him food in the canteen. Those people may have been at high risk of severe infection or truly unable to be vaccinated and were under the impression their risk was being controlled. When we assume consent we remove choice and that is not acceptable no matter how amazing your throwing arm. When you say you have the right to make a choice for your body that is correct, but not when by doing so you lie and remove that same choice from others.

Should we reward when off pitch behaviour hasn’t kept to the standard we proclaim to hold?

Last weekend Aaron Rogers was awarded the 2022 Most Valuable Player (MVP) award. I must admit to never having been more disappointed. NFL is one of the few sports that claims to care about off pitch conduct and in holding players to account in terms of behaviour. For a player to be awarded MVP in the same season that they were fined for the way they have behaved seems counter intuitive.

To me this whole situation has sent the wrong message. It says that if you are talented enough, rich enough, important enough the rules don’t apply to you. Even if you get caught out you get a minimal slap on the wrist and you will move on with no consequences. Rules are for the many and not for the few, especially public health rules which rely on us all coming together for the good of everyone. If you opt out the consequences are not just yours but ours. This isn’t just an issue for NFL, but for society as a whole. When those who are seen as ‘special’ are allowed to opt out it means that the rest of us are less likely to comply. In a world where compliance has never mattered more leadership is key.

Finally, I want to clear that this post isn’t about cancel culture. I’ve struggled with the way I feel over this. I’ve struggled with the fact that the behaviour of one individual and the lack of censor from the owners of the team has led me to feel less warmly about the other 52 players on that team. The rest of those players for the most part, won’t have the shield that Aaron Rogers is provided because of his talent, most of them will have obeyed the rules and done nothing wrong, even worse some of them will lose their jobs this year as well as the opportunity to get a Super Bowl ring and the opportunities that come with it. I don’t believe the rest of the team should suffer, but I do believe that when leaders in our communities break the rules they should at least learn from the experience. They should not be permitted to use the platform they have to then spread mis-information and pile on the harm and then be rewarded for it at the end of the season because they have talent. To me it gives out all the wrong messages. Leaders have responsibilities, talented people are not immune from the rules of society………be that beating up your girlfriend or putting others at risk of COVID-19. Until we are all held account to the same rules and the same law holds for us all there is no fairness and I for one will no longer count the likes of Aaron Rogers as one of my heroes, I’ll be sticking to the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg instead!

All opinions on this blog post are my own

Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science Day: A view from the Girly Side

girlymicro Academic Life, General, Microbiology (Clinical), Research/Academia, Science Communication

This topic means a lot to me. It wasn’t by accident that when, in 2012, I chose my twitter handle: I chose Girlymicro/Girlymicrobiologist. It has felt to me, since I started as a working scientist in 2004, that it was considered unprofessional to bring my whole self to work: to like pink and purple, to bake, to talk about science fiction and gaming. It was the start of the journey that I am still on, to show that we are better scientists when we bring our whole selves to work. Anything that acts as a barrier to that not only harms us as individuals, but also harms what we can achieve as a collective.

The Road Is Long
With Many a Winding Turn
That Leads Us to Who Knows Where…

You may not know this, but I started out as a zoologist. I adored it, I loved it, but there were no jobs in it. My undergraduate dissertation was on the ‘Demographics of Witchcraft Accusations from 1625 to 1715’. You may think that has nothing to do with what I do now but you’d be wrong. Studying human and animal behaviour helps me all the time in understanding some of the group decision-making that occurs in healthcare. The hours of my life spent learning how to undertake statistical modelling was not wasted. What I didn’t study a lot of was microbiology: I did a single module of microbiology during my whole degree.

I then went on to study not microbiology but the physics of biological interactions at surfaces as an MRes. This was where I learnt some microbiology and developed a love of applied science. When I started as a trainee Clinical Scientist, I had so much less experience of microbiology than any of the other more traditional trainees. I once asked why they hired me and the wonderful Dr Margaret Sillis, who acted as my mentor, responded ‘We can teach you microbiology, it’s much harder to teach you how to think’. I still think about that and the transferable skills I picked up by studying other disciplines still come in use all the time.

This trend of not following the standard path has continued. It’s why I ended up in Infection Prevention and Control rather than microbiology. Although the traditional paths are in some ways easier, as you will be able to walk the path that others have walked before you, don’t be afraid to wander the path untrodden if you think that it will be a more satisfying journey for you as an individual. You will learn so much along the way and open up new roads for others to follow.

Making the Invisible Visible

During the last 10 years, one of the things I’ve consciously decided to do is to be visible. In 2015 I was asked if I would be filmed for a project that the Royal Society of Biology were organising called ‘Biology: Changing the World’. For some years I had been told, by my lovely (male) boss, that I shouldn’t do media and shouldn’t be seen as ‘courting attention’ as it a) detracted from the work, and b) people were looking to make a story out of you. Don’t get me wrong, there is some truth to this. It also results in a fair amount of negative feedback, often from female colleagues, about grandstanding and attention seeking. You know what it also does, however: it hopefully means that when a girl in 20 years time is asked the question I’m asked in this video about what female scientist inspired her, there is a chance she will have a name. Not that I think I’m going to be that person. I’m not going to win a Noble Prize or have a Wkipedia page. I do, even today, remember very clearly the male science undergraduate who came and spoke to my primary school class about his job, I can be THAT girl. The one that someone meets up close and personal and shows that normal everyday women can work in science. That the door is open to them. I can shine a light and make the career path visible to those who might follow. So, next time you are invited to do that piece of outreach, that radio interview, that blog and your mind questions your worth, ask: if not me, then who? I promise you that the next person will not be more qualified than you, more worthy than you, more appropriate than you. So please say yes.

The Importance of Valuing Difference

The above point brings me onto something a bit trickier. I’ve been fortunate enough to win a number of awards for myself and with my wonderful team and partners for undertaking STEM engagement. Doing this work requires energy and time, both of which are frequently given on weekends and evenings. Or, in the case of today’s blog, annual leave. I feel a moral obligation to do this work as well as it being an important part of maintaining my registration to practice. The interesting thing is that it is frequently not viewed this way in either my clinical or academic environments. It is not seen as ‘work’ and I have on more than one occasion been told that if I was serious about my career progression I needed to ‘do less of that nonsense’. Sadly this isn’t a unique situation for me, but is something that many women in science face, especially in academia. In these areas women spend a greater proportion of their time undertaking public engagement and utilising ‘soft skills’, which are not valued when it comes to promotion panels.

Over time I believe I have started to change perspectives, but it takes even more work and investment in time. I’ve taken on additional positions, such as Joint Trust Lead Healthcare Scientist. This position has enabled me to speak to senior leaders about the benefits of the work in order to raise awareness and to capture impact. By actively working with wonderful colleagues on projects nominated for awards, such as the Advancing Healthcare Award for Reach Out for Healthcare Science, with Dr Philippa May, and with Nicola Baldwin for the Antibiotic Guardian Awards and CSO Awards for Nosocomial, I have started to make inroads into changing the conversation. Awards aren’t everything, but they do support you in re-positioning what you are doing in a way that fits into the ‘traditional way’ success is captured.

Whilst I’m on this particular topic, I would also like to make one of the points I often respond with when talking to colleagues who aren’t so engaged in public engagement and outreach. The days of healthcare workers being considered to be ‘the authority’ are quite rightly coming to an end. Those of us working in healthcare need to be engaging and working collaboratively with patients and the public to co-create what the future of healthcare might be and should look like. We can’t begin this work until we get out there and start having conversations. Rather than being ‘nonsense’, this work is key to future of the NHS and, especially, Healthcare Science.

“Amplification” is Where It’s At

During the Obama administration, despite it’s progressive nature, women found it hard to get their voices heard.

We’ve all been there. The meetings in which you make a comment or a response and you’re ignored, only for a man in the room to repeat the comment and have everyone react as if it is the first time they’ve heard it. As women in science, we are often the only women in the room and so making ourselves heard can be difficult.

The women in the Obama administration came up with an “amplification” strategy, where women in meetings repeated each other’s ideas as well as deliberately crediting the women who came up with them.

I work with some amazing women in Healthcare Science (Jane Freeman, Anna Barnes, Ruth Thomsen, Kerrie Davies and so many more) who do an excellent job of this amplification. I’d like to think that we all have a definite and deliberate attitude of amplifying each others voices and not falling into the trap (that happens way too often) of competing with each other. Be deliberate when you are in spaces with other women who may not be heard, actively listen and repeat. Focus on those moments that could make a difference and ensure that everyone in the room is heard. It requires active effort, but it definitely changes the course of conversations.

So how our male colleagues can help? This is definitely one of those areas. There are often not the women in the room to do this and so having allies who are happy to support in the same way is a definite help.

Change the View for One That is More Pleasing

One day the super-inspirational Dr Lena Ciric and I sat down over a cup of coffee and engaged in one of our regular consolation sessions. This was because, yet again, I had written a grant that had been successfully funded but it didn’t have my name on it. It had the name of one of my male professors. Lena had experienced similar things over the years and also the reviewers’ response of ‘not enough experience’ as a result of grant after grant that didn’t credit us. This cup of coffee was different: it was during this session we decided that, if we couldn’t change the playing field, we could change the view.

What do I mean by this? Academically, we were applying for funding within the clinical microbiology environment. A landscape that was already filled with vastly experienced and (mostly) older male medics. We were not going to succeed in breaking through the glass ceiling by applying within this space. Life lesson: we needed to find another space. So we very deliberately looked across the different funders to see where there was a landscape that wasn’t crowded with people like us and where we could constructively add something. We found it. We ended up putting in our first million pound grant to the EPSRC, an engineering research council who were looking to fund healthcare research and were not getting applications from researchers with enough clinical experience. We got the grant first time! Now we had a million pound grant AND we had the track record that means we can not only continue to apply in the new landscape but that also enables us to apply in the old arena.

Sometimes, if you continue to bang your fist against a closed door all you will get is a bloody fist. In these circumstances you need to take a step back and review whether there is another way to get to where you want to be. If there is, do it, you may not only succeed in your original goal but learn some other valuable skills along the way.

Finally, I wanted to finish with the above image of Shonda Rhimes. I am as guilty as the next person of talking about how lucky and fortunate I am, and it is true. That said, own your success: you’ve earned it, you’ve put in the hours, you’ve sacrificed, you’ve made it happen whilst balancing families, health issues and all kinds of other demands.

Be the badass I know you are!

All views in this blog are my own

Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science Day: A view from the Girly Side

girlymicro Academic Life, General, Microbiology (Clinical), Research/Academia, Science Communication

I’ve been asked to write a number of blog posts this year for International Day of Women and Girls in Science. I wanted to write an extra one that wasn’t so much a career guidance document, but more to celebrate some of the great approaches I have seen as a woman working in science. This post is based around some of the points that came out of a twitter conversation last week.

This topic means a lot to me. It wasn’t by accident that when, in 2012, I chose my twitter handle: I chose Girlymicro/Girlymicrobiologist. It has felt to me, since I started as a working scientist in 2004, that it was considered unprofessional to bring my whole self to work: to like pink and purple, to bake, to talk about science fiction and gaming. It was the start of the journey that I am still on, to show that we are better scientists when we bring our whole selves to work. Anything that acts as a barrier to that not only harms us as individuals, but also harms what we can achieve as a collective.

The Road Is Long
With Many a Winding Turn
That Leads Us to Who Knows Where…

You may not know this, but I started out as a zoologist. I adored it, I loved it, but there were no jobs in it. My undergraduate dissertation was on the ‘Demographics of Witchcraft Accusations from 1625 to 1715’. You may think that has nothing to do with what I do now but you’d be wrong. Studying human and animal behaviour helps me all the time in understanding some of the group decision-making that occurs in healthcare. The hours of my life spent learning how to undertake statistical modelling was not wasted. What I didn’t study a lot of was microbiology: I did a single module of microbiology during my whole degree.

I then went on to study not microbiology but the physics of biological interactions at surfaces as an MRes. This was where I learnt some microbiology and developed a love of applied science. When I started as a trainee Clinical Scientist, I had so much less experience of microbiology than any of the other more traditional trainees. I once asked why they hired me and the wonderful Dr Margaret Sillis, who acted as my mentor, responded ‘We can teach you microbiology, it’s much harder to teach you how to think’. I still think about that and the transferable skills I picked up by studying other disciplines still come in use all the time.

This trend of not following the standard path has continued. It’s why I ended up in Infection Prevention and Control rather than microbiology. Although the traditional paths are in some ways easier, as you will be able to walk the path that others have walked before you, don’t be afraid to wander the path untrodden if you think that it will be a more satisfying journey for you as an individual. You will learn so much along the way and open up new roads for others to follow.

Making the Invisible Visible

During the last 10 years, one of the things I’ve consciously decided to do is to be visible. In 2015 I was asked if I would be filmed for a project that the Royal Society of Biology were organising called ‘Biology: Changing the World’. For some years I had been told, by my lovely (male) boss, that I shouldn’t do media and shouldn’t be seen as ‘courting attention’ as it a) detracted from the work, and b) people were looking to make a story out of you. Don’t get me wrong, there is some truth to this. It also results in a fair amount of negative feedback, often from female colleagues, about grandstanding and attention seeking. You know what it also does, however: it hopefully means that when a girl in 20 years time is asked the question I’m asked in this video about what female scientist inspired her, there is a chance she will have a name. Not that I think I’m going to be that person. I’m not going to win a Noble Prize or have a Wkipedia page. I do, even today, remember very clearly the male science undergraduate who came and spoke to my primary school class about his job, I can be THAT girl. The one that someone meets up close and personal and shows that normal everyday women can work in science. That the door is open to them. I can shine a light and make the career path visible to those who might follow. So, next time you are invited to do that piece of outreach, that radio interview, that blog and your mind questions your worth, ask: if not me, then who? I promise you that the next person will not be more qualified than you, more worthy than you, more appropriate than you. So please say yes.

The Importance of Valuing Difference

The above point brings me onto something a bit trickier. I’ve been fortunate enough to win a number of awards for myself and with my wonderful team and partners for undertaking STEM engagement. Doing this work requires energy and time, both of which are frequently given on weekends and evenings. Or, in the case of today’s blog, annual leave. I feel a moral obligation to do this work as well as it being an important part of maintaining my registration to practice. The interesting thing is that it is frequently not viewed this way in either my clinical or academic environments. It is not seen as ‘work’ and I have on more than one occasion been told that if I was serious about my career progression I needed to ‘do less of that nonsense’. Sadly this isn’t a unique situation for me, but is something that many women in science face, especially in academia. In these areas women spend a greater proportion of their time undertaking public engagement and utilising ‘soft skills’, which are not valued when it comes to promotion panels.

Over time I believe I have started to change perspectives, but it takes even more work and investment in time. I’ve taken on additional positions, such as Joint Trust Lead Healthcare Scientist. This position has enabled me to speak to senior leaders about the benefits of the work in order to raise awareness and to capture impact. By actively working with wonderful colleagues to nominate work for awards, such as the Advancing Healthcare Award for Reach Out for Healthcare Science, with Dr Philippa May, and with Nicola Baldwin for the Antibiotic Guardian Awards and CSO Awards for Nosocomial, I have started to make inroads into changing the conversation. Awards aren’t everything, but they do support you in re-positioning what you are doing in a way that fits into the ‘traditional way’ success is captured.

Whilst I’m on this particular topic, I would also like to make one of the points I often respond with when talking to colleagues who aren’t so engaged in public engagement and outreach. The days of healthcare workers being considered to be ‘the authority’ are quite rightly coming to an end. Those of us working in healthcare need to be engaging and working collaboratively with patients and the public to co-create what the future of healthcare might be and should look like. We can’t begin this work until we get out there and start having conversations. Rather than being ‘nonsense’, this work is key to future of the NHS and, especially, Healthcare Science.

“Amplification” is Where It’s At

During the Obama administration, despite it’s progressive nature, women found it hard to get their voices heard.

We’ve all been there. The meetings in which you make a comment or a response and you’re ignored, only for a man in the room to repeat the comment and have everyone react as if it is the first time they’ve heard it. As women in science, we are often the only women in the room and so making ourselves heard can be difficult.

The women in the Obama administration came up with an “amplification” strategy, where women in meetings repeated each other’s ideas as well as deliberately crediting the women who came up with them.

I work with some amazing women in Healthcare Science (Jane Freeman, Anna Barnes, Ruth Thomsen, Kerrie Davies and so many more) who do an excellent job of this amplification. I’d like to think that we all have a definite and deliberate attitude of amplifying each others voices and not falling into the trap (that happens way too often) of competing with each other. Be deliberate when you are in spaces with other women who may not be heard, actively listen and repeat. Focus on those moments that could make a difference and ensure that everyone in the room is heard. It requires active effort, but it definitely changes the course of conversations.

Some of the comments on my twitter feed were about how our male colleagues can help. This is definitely one of those areas. There are often not the women in the room to do this and so having allies who are happy to support in the same way is a definite help.

Change the View for One That is More Pleasing

One day the super-inspirational Dr Lena Ciric and I sat down over a cup of coffee and engaged in one of our regular consolation sessions. This was because, yet again, I had written a grant that had been successfully funded but it didn’t have my name on it. It had the name of one of my male professors. Lena had experienced similar things over the years and also the reviewers’ response of ‘not enough experience’ as a result of grant after grant that didn’t credit us. This cup of coffee was different: it was during this session we decided that, if we couldn’t change the playing field, we could change the view.

What do I mean by this? Academically, we were applying for funding within the clinical microbiology environment. A landscape that was already filled with vastly experienced and (mostly) older male medics. We were not going to succeed in breaking through the glass ceiling by applying within this space. Life lesson: we needed to find another space. So we very deliberately looked across the different funders to see where there was a landscape that wasn’t crowded with people like us and where we could constructively add something. We found it. We ended up putting in our first million pound grant to the EPSRC, an engineering research council who were looking to fund healthcare research and were not getting applications from researchers with enough clinical experience. We got the grant first time! Now we had a million pound grant AND we had the track record that means we can not only continue to apply in the new landscape but that also enables us to apply in the old arena.

Sometimes, if you continue to bang your fist against a closed door all you will get is a bloody fist. In these circumstances you need to take a step back and review whether there is another way to get to where you want to be. If there is, do it, you may not only succeed in your original goal but learn some other valuable skills along the way.

Finally, I wanted to finish with the above image of Shonda Rhimes. I am as guilty as the next person of talking about how lucky and fortunate I am, and it is true. That said, own your success: you’ve earned it, you’ve put in the hours, you’ve sacrificed, you’ve made it happen whilst balancing families, health issues and all kinds of other demands.

Be the badass I know you are!

All views in this blog are my own

Guest Blog by Katy Heaney: Pathology: hidden service or hiding? Lets stop being shy

girlymicro General, Guest blog, Healthcare Science, Science Communication

This weeks guest blog is written by the ever talented Katy Heaney. The blog includes the first announcement of some super top secret work that Katy and #PathologyROAR have been undertaking linked to the #IValueLabStaff and #PathologyROAR recruitment videos. Keep your eyes peeled and followed the hashtags for me information from Wednesday 9th February. I for one (Girlymicro that is) cannot wait to finally find out what they’ve been working on.

Katy is a Consultant Clinical Scientist working for Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, part of the Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services network. Currently part-time seconded to the UKHSA working as the Point of care workflow lead for Operational Supplies. She has a passion for science communication, patient focused pathology testing, baking and painting.

A cup of tea in bed on a Sunday was a rarity for me in 2020. It had been a hard year for my Point of care testing (POCT) pathology service and there didn’t seem to be any let up ahead. Recruitment had been like a revolving door – as fast as we interviewed, people moved on and there didn’t seem to be any HCPC registered pathology staff not already employed.

As I meandered through my social media on a Sunday morning I found posts advertising recruitment in other healthcare fields but with a significant lack of inclusion of pathology.

My burnt-out brain, reflected on my teams, and the monumental national pathology effort in maintaining current pathology services as well as implementing and ramping up Covid-19 testing. I reached out to the pathology Twitter community to sing our own praises; how could we have been forgotten?

But internally I wonder; Are we really the hidden service, are we hiding, or are we shy?

In my career I have enjoyed being involved in National Pathology Week events reaching out beyond our laboratory doors to sing our praises and explain our science. The Royal College of Pathologists have a fantastic web page now of day in a life for pathology, example career pathways and events that take place for all ages. I was also lucky enough to be part of the Lab Tests Online UK team when we released the free app of the website; we held an app launch event and invited anyone we could think of to join us in celebrating pathology. Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies’ celebrity doctors joining us was a big highlight!

The Pathology Cake; designed and produced by scientist trainees at the LabTestsOnline UK App launch event. Note: all stock was expired and saved from bin for use on this “art”

Being a POCT specialist – I don’t spend a lot of time behind lab doors, far more walking the clinical floors to see how my kit is working or helping non-lab healthcare staff use the kit for their patients. I spend a lot of time explaining pathology to non-laboratory staff. I have always advocated that science communication is a skill in itself. It takes practice and thought; we cannot expect our most fabulous researchers or complex method specialists to also be able to explain to a member of the public what pathology is without working on how to translate our science jargon and considering understandable words.

We are under-resourced and small in comparison to many other healthcare staff groups. Finding the time to advocate and advertise pathology is hard to fit into the day job. The events organised by our professional bodies give us focus, but in recent years they have been stunted by service pressure.

We have jobs available; but seem to fail to reach the target audience

Recruitment for us is a long term process; when someone joins us we invest our time and energy in their learning and development. Finding the right individuals is important for us. Doing so at pace is even harder.

A real smack in the chops recognition last year for me was – I am no longer our target demographic! In a big birthday year myself, I recognise I am trying to recruit a younger generation who use different media. They have different career goals and the things that attracted me to pathology won’t necessarily be attractive to them.

Pathology in the media is VERY different from reality. The cringe worthy moments when medical drama surgeons decide to go run a pathology test to diagnose the rarest of diseases isn’t reality! The timelines of a drama episode don’t tolerate the timeline for a complex diagnostic pathology test and certainly not the staff that it takes to achieve it. Our real-life healthcare system regretfully doesn’t either; my own GP tells me my routine pathology test will take 5 days, while I internally sigh knowing it will be done by the following morning, but my overworked/overwhelmed GP surgery won’t be able to review and report it back to me to match the service we provide in pathology.

Media portrayal of the lab; Nope, nope, nope.

‘Grey’s Anatomy’ recap: Season 15, episode 16  | EW.com

The pandemic gave the smallest of glimpse into the world of pathology. PCR, lateral flow tests, and antibody levels being discussed in the news every night, but not enough spotlight was given to the 1000s of pathology staff it took to stand up NHS testing of patients. In my non-work social groups the jaw dropping shock of real life of pathology pressure on staff and service.

 If a blood transfusion laboratory stops running, an A&E will be closed to new patients: we are critical for so much more than Covid-19 testing. There is still a lot of public ignorance on pathology. I use the word here in this blog but know that for many it describes testing the dead or forensics. We are so much more.

So what is the reality of pathology?

A team of highly skilled, dedicated and evidence focused healthcare scientists. We employ those with degrees and those without, we train our own and do our own research and development. Most of our work is on the living; their blood, urine, poop, saliva; samples supplied for investigation. Some of our tests take seconds and some take weeks. IT and technology is a big part of our day. Every sample comes from a patient and everything we do is driven toward providing a better service that helps make better and quicker decisions. We are a fascinating workforce; the diversity of pathology is incredible. We are comprised of 17 different disciplines looking at every aspect of the human (and animal) body, and whether it is working and doing what it is meant to do. The tests you have heard of; glucose, urine pregnancy tests, iron, biopsies, smear tests, Covid-19 PCRs…..and 1000s more that you haven’t.

We have so many different entry points from national training programmes like the Scientist Training Programme, local trainee Biomedical Scientist trainee positions and all the support roles we require for pathology services to run; administration, stores, transport and reception support. There is a role for so many; not just the young generation I refer to earlier, but those looking for a change, a swerve in career or even a few shifts working as part of a team.

There is no denying, we need to grow more healthcare scientists. Our numbers are small, it takes time to gain experience and knowledge, and our workloads expand year on year. 1000s of students do Biomedical science degrees but not enough of these come to pathology for their career. If you are a student considering a career in pathology; consider attending the IBMS Student congress event https://congress.ibms.org/student-congress.html for talks on careers, CV writing, placements and meet the staff working in our services.

What did I do about it?

Well that Sunday morning cuppa sparked a group of us working in pathology to recognise our common goal – the desire to roar about pathology and express how much we value lab staff. We wanted that message to get out there; to students, to influencers, to anyone looking for a career change. And we wanted to do so with real-life examples of those who work in pathology to showcase the passion for their work.

On Wednesday 9th February at 8pm we will be showcasing our #IValueLabStaff videos of real pathology staff; wearing their real-life lab coat or at their desk, talking about what they love about their jobs. Join us for the #PathologyROAR and celebrate with us.

All opinion on this blog are my own

Time for Some Real Talk: I have the best job in the world & even I don’t know how much more I can take

girlymicro General, Microbiology (Clinical), Science Communication

Let me start with the positive and please bear this is mind as you read this post. I adore my job, I can’t imagine doing anything else. In a way that is probably a little unhealthy, it is a lot of what defines me. I found my place and my calling and I’m not going anywhere. That said the last 2 years have been filled with extremely long days and unpaid weekends leading me to be more exhausted and broken than either a PhD or FRCPath exams achieved, partly because for both of those you knew when it would end. So I want to shine a light on how I feel in order for others to feel less alone if they are feeling the same way, and to remind us all that, despite how it feels right now, it has not always been like this and that this too shall pass.

Last night in a press conference our Prime Minster uttered the words ‘extraordinary effort’. It wasn’t in praise, it was a request for all of us in healthcare to make one more effort, to step up to the plate yet again and give it our all for the sake of the country. The thing is, phrasing a request like this doesn’t feel like a call to action to me anymore, it feels more like an insult. Although I acknowledge people’s experiences of the pandemic have been vastly variable, for most healthcare workers we’ve been making an ‘extraordinary effort’ for almost 2 years. Two years of changing guidance, 2 years of practically no down time and in recent times, experiencing both abuse and bad temper, alongside belittling of the things we are doing to find a way out of this i.e. requests to wear masks and to get vaccinated.

Given it is undoubtedly hard right now what can we do to get each other through this (other than make press conference statements – yes I may be a little bitter). This post isn’t based on evidence, I’m just going to talk here from personal experience. I know this is what I tell others off for as anecdotes aren’t facts. However as this is about feelings I can only truly tell it from my perspective.

Acknowledge all burdens are not equal and any single solution won’t fix everything

As a lot of people have pointed out, we may be in the same storm but we are all in very different boats, our experience and well as stressors throughout this aren’t the same. As leaders, colleagues and friends it therefore crucial that we take time to understand the things that are adding to stress levels and impacting our colleagues. For instance, because of my health it is easier for me if I can work from home a couple of days a week. It saves me a 3 hour return commute and gives me space to mentally focus on tasks without interruption. For someone else however, they might find working from home in itself a stressor, they may wish to have distinct work and home separation, they may have a lack of space or family reasons why this makes it harder for them not easier. We need to work on how to check in with our colleagues about what it is that they find difficult and then, where possible, customise our approaches to support them. It takes longer and requires more resource, but if we’re serious about helping each other through this than that is what it is going to take. I believe we should be finding equity rather than equality in our solutions, although fairness is important:

  • Equality is providing the same level of opportunity and assistance to all
  • Equity is providing various levels of support and assistance depending on specific needs

A little respect goes a long way

At times of stress and challenge it is really easy to close down in terms of empathy and compassion. I hold up my hands to raising my voice in a meeting last week. I did immediately apologise, but it is really difficult with the cognitive and emotional load everyone is experiencing, coupled with me being so tired to always remember to think of others. Every little moment like that if not addressed chips away at the others in the room and adds an unnecessary additional burden. At the moment, in those moments where we may not feel like it, it is even more important enough to be kind to each other.

Whether you are in a formal or informal leadership position, it is also really important right now to acknowledge the work of those around you. It’s easy to have tunnel vision and revert to task thinking when we are all so overwhelmed but people are doing A LOT based on good will. If we want people to go above and beyond then we need to acknowledge it and respect the fact that it is not a given that it will always happen. Saying thank you is still a powerful tool.

The system isn’t set up to support us so lets change it

Two years into the pandemic the system is still not set up to support the work demands that are being placed on the workforce. I have colleagues who have not had a full day off in two years. I do weekends on-call without any acknowledgement in terms of pay or returned time. From conversations I’ve had most IPC teams do not have systems in place to support on-call working, despite the fact that we have just about all had to do it over the last 2 years. We’ve all been doing this because we focus on the needs of the patient and the service, but at some point the service and the system that it sits within needs to be fixed. Services shouldn’t constantly rely on good will and changes need to me made so the system is empowered to support those who work within it. When emergencies and major incidents first happen it takes a while for the infrastructure and the system as a whole to respond, at this point however we need to be looking to the future and working to fix the system we work within. This won’t be the last time we have to face these kind of challenges, although hopefully not over such a protracted period, lets learn the lessons and get measures in place to make it better for everyone moving forward.

The workforce issues are going to get worse before they get better

As I said, I’m not going anywhere, but it would be naïve to say that this is the wider attitude amongst healthcare workers. A number of my colleagues who could retire have done so, more have moved either into non operational roles or out of healthcare all together. I don’t feel we have reached the peak of this yet. I think a lot of people will stay until they feel this aspect is over and then make decisions about what is best for them moving forward, burn out is a real thing right now. This will place even more pressure on those of us who remain. Its takes ~11 years to train a me, there aren’t a lot of people waiting in the wings to swoop in and support. My guess is also that a fair amount of trainees will be included in the numbers who are considering alternative choices. Those of us who remain need to know what the plan is? How are the exhausted workforce who remain going to be supported so they don’t have to then do the work of the 2 people who have left as well as their own? Are we, as we all predict, going to be hit my massive catch up targets when the pandemic is finally over which means there will be no respite to support recovery. The focus of the system seems to (understandably) be on right now but to give people hope for the future we need to know that there is a plan on how we will make it through not just today, but tomorrow and next year.

This isn’t a war, no matter how much our politicians language make it sound like it is

A lot of the language people have utilised linked to the pandemic has very deliberately utilised language reflective of going to war. In some ways this creates a nice psychological short cut in terms of significance and in peoples minds. The problem with it is that most healthcare professionals didn’t enlist to be part of a war, they are not obligated to stay and fight it out. The support systems are not part of the existing infrastructure to enable them to deal with the stress and emotional load we have put upon them. Most of them have given extra hours and supported extra job roles as part of good will, a gift if you like from them to wider society. However, like all gifts these can and should not be taken for granted, they are under no obligation to just keep on giving. We have moved from an emergency situation to a state of life, as much as we don’t want to acknowledge it. It’s a state of life that will not last forever but we cannot expect people to continuously act like they are in emergency response anymore. Plans and language aimed at healthcare workers need to acknowledge this otherwise we are not recognising the reality of most of their lives.

Wellness programmes are not going to fix this

I’ve already come out as not being the biggest fan of wellness programmes, although I know what they are trying to achieve. I’ve talked before about the fact that I think the NHS system has to address the issues and not continuously put the responsibility on individuals to fix. That said I don’t think the system is going to ‘White Knight’ for me anytime soon. I have come up with a strategy for me that means when I reach the point that all I want to do is walk out or walk away I have a bathroom disco. For those of you who don’t know I have a converted bathroom cubicle as my office, hence bathroom disco. I frequently fail to make time for food or even a couple of tea, back in the day I used to have a walk around the block or settle down for a cup of tea, I drink my tea black it takes 20 minutes to cool, when things became too much. There’s no time for any of that right now. When it becomes overwhelming I’ve decided I will allow myself a ~3minute bathroom disco break. I lock the door, put on an energising track and dance like a loon. It not only brings me joy but stops me spiralling and wakes me up enough to re-set myself for the challenge ahead. If we have going to survive this we all need to find a bathroom disco equivalent to get us through the next 5 minutes some days, let alone the next 5 months.

So there it is. I’m going to put on my big girl pants and prepare again for my ‘extraordinary effort’. Those making these requests however should remember that I am so fortunate to know that I will eventually get back to a job I love. Others were not so fortunate prior to this and so they are right now making different choices in response to your plea. Lets follow our words with actions that also enable them to stay!

All opinions on this blog are my own

Saturday Morning Zombies: how infection is portrayed in the genre

girlymicro General, Science Communication

As it’s Halloween and National Pathology Week 2021 is coming up I thought I’d re-share my love of zombie movies plus a little activity if anyone is looking for a fun outbreak to run with colleagues or as part of outreach.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m spending my day watching zombie movies. There is a reason that I watch in the morning… I’m a complete scaredy-cat and so I don’t want to watch these before I go to sleep. Also, I don’t really like horror movies. Correction: I only like horror movies with plot, i.e. Get Out.

So, why am I spending Saturday exploring the world of zombie horror?

Three reasons:

  • Despite not liking horror movies as such, I’m intellectually obsessed with how infection is portrayed in them and debating whether the infectious cause would result in different types of zombies.
  • Nicola Baldwin and I, because of our shared obsession with the genre (albeit for different reasons), are going to create a new piece of work on zombies and infection for the Rise of the Resistance Festival (online 7th and 8th May 2021). I therefore need to do some homework.
  • My husband really really likes zombie movies: he is super-stoked that this is my weekend homework, rather than writing papers or analysing data

My friends and I talk about this so much as part of our ‘pub conversations’ that we honestly do have a zombie survival plan. So much so that one of my best friends included saving her husband ‘during the zombie apocalypse’ as part of her wedding vows. This may sound silly and, believe me, it is; But there is some interesting and philosophical stuff in here:

  • Where is the best place to run to (cities vs country)?
  • What would you do in the 1st 24 hours, 1st week, 1st month?
  • Who would you get to join your party? Why? What skills do you need?
  • Do you take people along for the ride because you like them, or does everyone have to have purpose?
  • What rules of society might you abandon for the sake of saving the human race, i.e. monogamy, patriarchy?
  • How much aid would you offer to strangers ‘Good of the Many’?
  • Would you opt to die as you or turn if infected? ‘Survival at any cost and in any form?’
  • What would your ‘rules’ be?

These questions are all about how we, as humans, would react to a zombie outbreak. However, the thing that really fascinates me is how the zombie might change based on the cause of the zombie infection.

There are real life instances where infection can result in behaviour change. As part of my interest in this, I created the activity at the bottom of the page called ‘Zombie Island’. It was one of the first public engagement activities I designed and ended up being turned into a live action takeover event in the city centre of Toronto, where visitors had to solve different clues and challenges in order to cure themselves before they became zombies. The activity in Toronto was called Zombie Rendezvous and the link to the booklet is below:

zombie-rendezvous-printableDownload

Zombie Island – How Will You Save your Tropical Island Home?

The first thing you need to do is design your zombie. Will it be due to:

  • A virus?
  • A bacteria
  • A fungus?

This decision will affect not only how your zombie transmits infection, but also how fast and easy/hard to kill it is.

How do infectious causes affect zombie characteristics?

Slide taken from Design You Zombie Activity (see downloads below)

Once you have your zombies designed you can then play the scenario. Each different type of zombie requires different infection control and public health decisions/prioritisation. Make the wrong choices and the zombies will reach the port or airport and get off your island to infect the outside world. They can also infect your food supply, take down your military, or cause mass point-source outbreaks if you fail to shut down public events. All decisions aren’t equal, so make your choice…+

Zombie outbreak handoutDownload
Zombie outbreak handout – picsDownload
Design A Zombie activityDownload

More on all of this later when I’ve watched some movies. Remember – aim for the head!

All opinions on this blog are my own.

Some Days All We Control Is Ourselves: How to respond when things don’t go to plan

girlymicro General

Earlier this week I made a post about wellness programmes and the problems I have engaging with them. I did say however, that I don’t discount the fact that sometimes we need to take some personal action to manage the situation we are in, even if that is to just to survive to the next encounter.

What kind of situation am I talking about? Well this post was prompted by something that happened a couple of weeks ago. I gave a talk, it was supposed to be inspiring, but I felt it didn’t land. I followed a really amazing speaker who everyone really engaged with and so it felt really clear to me that I didn’t get a similar response. It was my second talk of the day, in the middle of a week where I was running conferences on the Monday and the Friday. Needless to say I was feeling more than a little tired.

Why is the fact that I was tired important? What kind of impact does that have on my perceptions? Was the outcome, in terms of talk impact, a real failure or just a perceived one? Also it was just a talk so does it really matter?

The truth is that maybe the circumstances in this case didn’t have significant outcomes. However I think this is just an example of how fatigue and tiredness can alter our perceptions of performance. In some cases this altered perception can lead to more consequences for us as individuals, in terms of stress etc, and also change the way we do our jobs, therefore impacting on others.

So, I was curious whether it is just me that feels this way. Are others more likely to feel like a failure, or that they have failed, when they are tired. So I ran a poll on twitter and I was pretty surprised by the results:

I’ve always felt really alone in this and that my response to tiredness, increasing levels of self criticism and feelings of failure, was a ‘me thing’ and probably a weakness/fault. I don’t know therefore whether I was pleased or saddened by the results. It seems like most of us feel this way at least some of the time, so why don’t we talk about it more? In a world where the focus is being placed on us to to find ways forward and when, I suspect, many of us are feeling broken, stressed and tired, what can we do to support ourselves and others through these periods where we are feeling like our own harshest critics?

So having said that wellness sessions don’t really work for me what can we do? Some of the lovely people who responded on twitter gave some great advice, which I’ve combined with some my random thoughts to try and help us all in finding a way through when everything feels too much. All things won’t work for all people but hopefully there is something that could work for everyone as a piece of support or way forward.

Try to be self aware and remind yourself of the cause

By identify the route cause you can start to distance yourself from it, you’ll also hopefully be able to find an intervention that might help. Tired, try and find a window to sleep. Stressed, try and be kind to yourself and find some time to do something you enjoy. Know that you can re-evaluate once you’ve given yourself some time/space/sleep. It’s worth considering what your interventions in different scenarios might be when you are in a good place so you have a plan for when you need it in order to alleviate how you feel.

Try to not make decisions and react when aware you are in a hyper reactive mind set

Leading on from being aware of how you are feeling, a key suggestion was knowing what not to do when you’re not feeling quite yourself. Don’t send emails, make decisions or react during a time when you’re judgement may not be truly reflective of your normal thought processes. In these periods I tend towards being overly apologetic, submissive etc, others I know will tend to be the opposite and come across as less collaborative. Wait until you can find your way back to the middle ground.

Try to change your inner dialogue

If you find yourself spiralling (see my previous shame spiral post) do something to put yourself in a different mindset, read a book, go for a run, make a to do list with some things that are easy to tick off. I find shame spiralling slightly different as it’s linked to a specific event rather than a general feeling (which my mind can sometimes hook onto things). Often when I shame spiral it’s because I’ve actually failed, rather than just perceiving I have, but the response is similar. For most things in life, tomorrow offers a re-do. If what has happened is non critical, or even if it is critical but is fixable then tomorrow will arrive and with it some level of distance to support reflection plus hopefully with the benefit of sleep and relaxation.

Reach out to trusted advisors and get a reality check

Try to be kind with yourself by thinking how you would respond to someone else in your situation and use that as a benchmark. I often find this impossible to do by myself and so that’s where checking in with my friends really helps. I’m lucky enough to have wonderful colleagues who I also count as friends, who are always willing to have tea, catch up via WhatsApp or provide support via twitter. Know who your trusted people are and be open and honest with where you are at. As the poll showed me you will be surprised at how many people have experience of what you’re going through and how they can support you through it.

Know tomorrow is another day

This doesn’t help everyone, but one thing helps me quite a lot. When the going gets tough, the tough get planning. To tide me over to the point where I can make actual decisions or feel more like me, I find daydreaming about plans for that future helpful. I start to plan holidays or pleasant experiences, anything that draws my mind from the present. I try to consciously be aware of the fact that the way I feel now won’t last and think about what could happen when I’m refreshed.

Remember the good times

Quite a few people have said that it is useful to keep a success/achievement list somewhere. It is all too easy when feeling this way to only focus on our failures, be they real or perceived, but keeping a list in a drawer/computer folder can be a useful prompt. This doesn’t have to be a work related list, it should cover the whole of your life and remind you that you are more than just a job/situation and of everything you have to offer. As Laura said ‘more roses, less thorns’

Do something you love

Sometimes it’s not about addressing the problem, sometimes it’s about treating yourself, or as my wellness colleagues would say ‘self care’. In my case I go back to movies/TV series as that bring me comfort or cook. I watched a Christmas movie a couple of weeks ago as they are a place of comfort and joy to me. Other people suggesting singing, going to the spa, reading a favourite book. My friends and I often talk about making our pit of despair comfortable if we’re going to be there for a while. This is what this is to me. I acknowledge that I may not just snap out of it, so how do I make myself feel better whilst I get through it.

Put your feelings into context

As stated at the start I tend to focus my feelings of failure, linked to tiredness, onto different scenarios. These are often for me perceived issues rather than actually knowing that something has happened i.e. thinking I gave a bad talk rather than receiving the evaluation that says I gave a bad talk. Similar I know, but I think the way out of it for me is different. If like me you start to obsess I sometimes try to make myself take a step back. If it didn’t go well, does it really matter. In my case this week the worst case scenario here is that I am not invited back to speak, and some people might feel slightly less of my skill set. Now this hurts as part of my sense of identity is that I’m not a bad public speaker and I quite enjoy it. That said, does it matter? I don’t believe I am the best public speaker in the world, so as part of that I have to acknowledge that there will be people who do a better job at it than I, it’s not going to cost me my career. If it is something that matters, then know that once you feel more yourself, that is the time to make plans about recovery. Definitely not whilst you are in the midst of it.

Stop fighting it

This may be the 90s goth in me but sometimes you just need to sit back, ride the wave and enjoy the rain:

One thing you have all taught me is that feeling this way is not a failure in itself, it’s not a weakness, it is life and so lets not beat ourselves up about it, lets watch a movie, bake a cake and know that it will end.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Lets Talk About Wellness: Is it just me whose struggling to engage with wellness programmes?

girlymicro General

I’ve had a LOT of emails and messages this week linked to various Wellness Programmes and links and my emotional response to them has surprised me. I’m not normally a cynic, I’m usually someone who is keen to engage and see the benefit of things. I have, instead of wanting to engage with these items, been really irritated by them and so I wanted to explore why I feel this way and understand if I’m the only one.

Let me start by talking about what my currently day to day looks like, as I think my thoughts linked to this are very context specific. I’m just getting home at 19:30 after leaving the house at 6:30 this morning and working a 10hr day without lunch or tea break.  I have an hour and half to spend with my husband and eat before going to bed and starting the whole thing again tomorrow.  The sad thing is that this has actually been quite a reasonable day, 12+ hour days are frequent.

Last week I ran 2 conferences and so wasn’t tied to my desk, followed by a couple of days off sick post booster vaccine That meant going into last weekend I had over 2200 emails on my inbox and over 1100 unread. I needed to cover IPC over the weekend and so in order to try to get back on top of it I worked to get the email mountain down from 2200+ to 156 to action. As I’m also on clinical this week that action pile in one day is back up to 190.

What’s the point of me telling you this? I think my aim is show that I fight just to stand still. If I take my eye off the ball even for a day I sink into quick sand. No one covers my whole role if I’m off sick, there isn’t another Consultant Clinical Scientist in the department. My point is that I don’t get how wellness works when this is my life?

My Trust and the NHS has invested a lot in wellness programmes and resilience training. This post may sound like its having a go at the really lovely people who provide those programmes and put so much energy into getting them up and running, but it isn’t. This is a post that is expressing my tiredness and exhaustion at working in Infection Prevention and Control in a pandemic within a system that does not deliver the resource for lunchbreaks, let alone provision for me to be training up my successor so there would be cover.

So what is that doesn’t work for me about wellness and resilience programmes?

The programmes we’ve instituted are things like ‘Wellness Wednesdays’ which includes a lunch time seminar on a wellness topic. We’ve been given access to the headspace app to support meditation and promote sleeping and healthy eating. There are also things like yoga sessions run in the Trust and GOSH supported 5k Park runs to encourage an active life style. There’s also access to counselling.

All of this looks amazing when written down and don’t get me wrong I think its great. However it only works if you’ve addressed the system issues that are driving some of the problems.

For example, I have never managed to attend a wellness seminar, despite having them in my diary, because I don’t have time to have lunch and usually spend my life in back to back ‘urgent’ work zooms. The biggest system change for me would be to enable me to have a lunch break and then I could choose whether to spend it on a wellness seminar OR I could step outside my windowless office and see sunlight!

The activity stuff is great. I used to run pre-pandemic. Now I work mostly 12 hours days with a 3 hour round trip commute. On a good day I get 2 hours at home in the evening during which time I might, for instance, have time to wash my hair and eat. On weekends I am either working or too broken to make food and catch up with all of the household tasks, such as food shopping, that are needed to get me through the next week. In terms of wellness, the better fix for me would be to enable me to actually have a homelife so I could choose what to do with it, if I don’t have time to eat I’m not going to be able to join in yoga.

One of the final things that I find really tricky about all the wellness stuff is that it seems to go on and on about being present in the moment. I have a meeting in a Tuesday where the first 5 minutes is a wellness meditation. I will give an honest confession here, if I have time I use that 5 minutes to actually make a cup of tea so I can have a drink. This doesn’t normally happen as I’m always running late from previous zooms, but that is the intervention that works for me. I find being in the present hard. I’m exhausted and physically pretty broken, spending 5 minutes noticing that is not helpful to me. I’m surviving this by planning and focusing on the future, which is how I always manage my stress and survive.

So where is the system letting me down?

Some of the problem with this is the way that Healthcare Science functions. We’re not like some other specialists, who effectively do the same job with different specialisms and therefore cover each other for sickness and holiday. We’re not like some other colleagues who work in a team of multiple similar roles and, although may not always truly cross cover, have someone to pick up their responsive role. We are usually lone individuals, as there’s never considered to be enough work to have more than one of us. That causes issues in terms of career progression and training up someone to eventually take over (as it can take 10+ years) but it also means that no one actually covers your work load. They may pick up the screaming urgent stuff that has to be managed but the rest just builds and builds.

All of this means taking holiday becomes a trial that becomes inherently stressful. You spend so much time trying to pin everything down before you go that you pull double hours and when I return I frequently have up to 3000 – 4000 emails and my diary is back to back as I’ve been unavailable for a week or 2.

It also means that when that workload becomes too much it very hard to get someone to help carry the load. Don’t get me wrong, I have great teams and we work really well together but I don’t have someone I’m training up to be the new me that I can hand bits off to, in the way my medical colleagues do with their registrars. It also means we’re not planning for the future

It’s not just Healthcare Scientists that are struggling however, so it’s not unique to us as a group. It is physically not possible to be on 8 hours of zoom calls, deal with 300 – 600 emails and a day and then actually do productive work that requires thinking on top of this. So how do we change the system to improve the way that we communicate? To determine whether the meetings we have are productive? To change expectations in terms of being available for 8am meetings and 6pm meetings when we only supposedly work 9 – 5? This is something we can start to tackle as individuals but requires changes in culture, which is in my opinion is something that organisations should be investing in as much as free yoga.

Instead the response is usually that we should find things that we can drop to create time and space. The sad thing about this response is that it means all drivers for work become focussed on core work and reduces both time and acceptance for tasks that require creativity and innovation, the kind of tasks that will actually permit changes to the system in which we are existing. For me it is these tasks that energise rather than drain me, these tasks that give me hope that I will make it out the other end and permit planning for a future where we do things better for both ourselves and our patients. I feel especially infuriated when I’m told I should discard the only things that are enabling me to continue, to do even more of all the things that are leaving me hollow and tired, even when these things are done on top of everything else. I know to many it seems like an easy fix but to me it would be the straw that broke my back.

So here’s my plea. Instead of placing the burden to fix burn out on individuals, lets also work with the systems that led us here. The pandemic is a once in a lifetime challenge, but what it’s done is expose problems that were already present in the system, not ones that only exist because of the pandemic. Personal responsibility is important, but making people feel responsible for their burnout as if its another of their failures is not the way forward. Support them, offer individual help, but also acknowledge the system wide issues that led them there.

Apologies for the rant, but I for one feel waaaaaaaaaaaay better for getting that off my chest. Now I’m off to watch a YouTube video on the importance of laughter yoga.

All opinions on this blog are my own.

Happy Birthday Girlymicrobiologist Blog: One year on what I have learnt about writing a blog?

girlymicro General

The Girlymicrobiologist blog is one year old today, well in actual fact it’s 6 but we’re not talking about the wilderness years when it lingered unused. It started out as a way to help deal with some of the madness of the pandemic and in order to feel like I had a direct route to talk about science and being a scientist, that was unfiltered through anyone else. I thought it would be read by a handful of people and would be highly niche, but in the last year I’ve published 73 posts, and had over 16,000 views from ~11,000 visitors. Numbers I could never have dreamed of. I know there will be many blogs out there with much higher numbers but for someone who is basically putting her thoughts on electronic paper once a week I am constantly shocked and delighted by the response. So as someone who came into this a complete novice I wanted to share a few things I’ve learnt and thoughts that I’ve had.

It’s OK to break the rules

When I first started writing blogs for other people I was told to obey the following rules:

  • 500 – 800 words
  • 2 – 3 pictures
  • use sub-headings
  • post at the same time regularly

Now that I write one for myself you may have noticed that I have pretty much abandoned the word limit, if not the sub-headings. I try to post on a Friday, as writing my blog is what I do on a Friday night. You can however see that I also frequently don’t succeed at this. Mostly because I’m a real person managing this on top of a fairly stressful job and doing the best I can.

In terms of article length, apparently more the modern thinking is that the longer the length the more reads something will get and people are investing time and so like more for that investment. That’s not the reason my posts are longer however, my posts are longer because I don’t really over edit myself. I want to write as if you and are sitting and chatting over a nice G and T. This is probably not considered an acceptable ‘style’ but its mine and I’m OK with that. So my advice now is to write what you’re passionate about in a way that works for you and, in the nicest possible way, screw the rules.

Numbers only have meaning if you give it to them

I’ve quoted some numbers in terms of posts and viewership to you, but actually one of the main things I’ve learnt is that those don’t really matter. When people started to read the blog I tried to find benchmarks by which I could measure success, I am a scientist after all, What I found was that most of the benchmarks out there are for people who are doing this professionally or want to make money. I am neither of these things and so I found it hard to judge what I should be aiming for. What I’ve landed on, because I personally needed something, is a readership of ~1000 views a month. Mostly because I was looking for consistency, rather than any kind of massive growth.

Reads are obviously closely linked to numbers of posts. I try to post every week, in order to keep things regular and for people to get into a rhythm of knowing when things are going to come out. If you post more you will get more reads. Therefore you need to decide early on how much metrics matter to you. Some people find metrics are a good way of motivating them and giving them structure. I am a somewhat obsessive individual and if I focussed too much on numbers I would end up writing blogs at midnight in order to make sure I hit that weeks count and feeling like a failure if I didn’t hit quota. Because of this I tend to use metrics as a light touch to look at trends rather than using them to judge success.

I don’t really know what will land and generate a lot of reads

We’ve talked about everything from tea to childlessness on Girlymicro and what I’ve learnt is that I don’t ever know which posts will really resonate with people and get a lot of reads and which won’t. For instance my post about being childless in my 40 got over 2500 views, for a post that I thought would be read by and resonate with a small number of people. Other posts that I thought would have wide appeal have been read by a few hundred. Some of this is probably based on the timing of the post and who picks something up and shares it on. I try not to get too worried about this because, as I’ve said, I’ve decided not to be too concerned about numbers. I want to sit on a Friday night and write honestly from me to you, if that post has meaning for one other person that’s good enough for me.

I did think at the start that I would write a lot more about technical science, but as time has gone on that’s really not what I write about. There are a few reasons for this. One, there are many great technical science blogs out there that review the literature and sign post to good papers. I do some of this but mostly if I’m writing about science it also has a narrative element linked to it. I think that’s because what I’ve decided I most like to talk about is de-mystifying science and who scientists are. I want to talk about the highs and lows, the things that I’ve learnt and the things we can do better. These topics are the ones I haven’t found covered so well by other sources and also have the most meaning to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that what resonates most well are the posts that are authentically me, and that the topic is almost secondary. That’s serendipitous as those are also the posts that are easiest to write and so I just go with writing about things I care about.

Once you start it’s hard to stop

On the subject of writing about things that I care about. I had thought when I started, that writing a blog once a week would be a chore and that I would find it difficult to find things to talk about. The opposite has been true, I have a lot more ideas than I thought possible. For instance, I currently have 93 blog posts in some level of draft. I’m inspired to write by seeing what everyone tweets, by time taken with friends and colleagues to have cups of tea, and by corridor conversations. Ideas are sparked by reading news articles, by watching programmes and movies, by people sharing their science and by unexpected events that elicit an emotional response of some kind.

On a Friday night I will often sit down and words just happen, I have planned to write about something but then something will happen or I will have a thought and the words come almost fully formed. I don’t fight it and, for those of you who read this regularly, you’ll notice there are plenty of spelling and other mistakes. I write in a stream of consciousness and don’t worry about editing myself too much. I don’t aim for perfection, I aim for honestly.

We’re on this journey together and I don’t know where we will go

I have a had a number of people comment on how brave my blog is, but I don’t really think it’s brave. What I hope it is, is an honest space where I trust you to read what I write with the intention of that writing in mind, and that you trust me to not glamourize or pull punches with what I share. I hope that you know that I write in order to help us learn and develop together, to raise awareness and to help us rise to our challenges and everyday be a little more courageous together.

So where do we go from here? I’m not someone who can function without a plan, but I’m kind of trying. I’m really enjoying this, the dialogue and the conversations writing has prompted. I feel so much less alone in the challenges I face, and so something that I started in order to help others has ended up helping me so much more than I had believed possible.

Some lovely people have said I could try and get an agent interested in the blog, to be honest I wouldn’t even know where to start, although I will happily take suggestions if anyone has any. For now the most important thing for me, is that you and I keep our regular catch ups, that we spend 10 minutes together over virtual tea and cake, and continue to learn and grow in each others company. To every one of you who has invested some of your precious time in reading the blog over the last year I am grateful beyond having words to express. In what has been the most challenging of times you have been kind, generous and supportive, and I don’t know I would have made it through as intact as I have without you. Thank you!

All opinions on this blog are my own.

Embarking on My 17th Year as a Healthcare Scientist: What have I learnt?

girlymicro General, Microbiology (Clinical)

When I applied to become a Clinical Scientist (the term Healthcare Scientist didn’t exist then) in 2004 I have to admit I didn’t even know what one was. This lack of awareness that such a wonderful position existed has been a real driver for me ad became an ongoing passion to raise the profile of this, all too often invisible work force, that impacts across patient pathways and is so key to patient outcomes. If the great future scientists out there don’t know that they can join us, they never will.

Life has changed a lot since I walked in on my first day with very little idea how to pipette, what Staphylococcus aureus was, or how to spell Erythromycin. I (mostly) know what I’m talking about now, I’ve got married, brought a house, got a PhD, passed FRCPath and been awarded a New Years Honour. Importantly for me I found my passion, I know my why and I’m privileged to work with amazing people doing the best job on the planet.

My NHS career turned 17 on the 4th October 2021 and so is old enough to learn to drive. In continuing this metaphor I thought I’d write about the journey so far and what I’ve learnt.

Things to know as you start out on your journey

Have a plan

Your plan will change and evolve over time but if you want to make the most of the opportunities presented to you it’s worth having an idea of what boxes you need to tick in order to get to various fixed points along the way. Do you ultimately want a consultant post? You’ll need FRCPath, what will you need to be able to get there? Do you want to be a lab manager? You’ll need some leadership, recruitment and management experience, what opportunities can you access to help you?

Having a plan doesn’t mean you should feel boxed in and trapped by these ideas, but you can use them to help you prioritise chances that are presented to you. Not only that but can use it to ground yourself when everything feels a little overwhelming. You can also use this awareness to find champions and coaches/mentors that will help support you along the way. Invest a little time early on to make the most of your time later.

It’s OK to re-plan your route

Opportunities will come about and open up that you can’t predict when you start out. The term Healthcare Scientist didn’t exist when I joined the NHS, therefore there certainly weren’t any lead Healthcare Scientists. Getting a PhD wasn’t part of my plan, as when I joined there wasn’t a clear route through to being a Consultant, and so I didn’t know that I needed one. The National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) has been a massive part of my scientific career, enabling me to have a role as a Clinical Academic, but they didn’t even exist until 3 years+ into my career.

So have a plan, but don’t be so tied to it and so linear that you miss out on things that will change your life and career. Having the right people as part of your networks can help you realise when you need to take a leap of faith into one of these alternate routes is key.

Sometimes you may take a wrong turn, the extra journey will not be wasted

There will be times during your career when things don’t go to plan. Road blocks will spring up, paths that seemed clear will be obscured, and to be frank sometimes the car will just break down. The thing to bear in mind at these points is that none of this time is wasted as long as you learn from the experiences being offered to you. Sometimes these experiences are not particularly pleasant whilst you are going through them. I would be lying to you if I said there wouldn’t be challenges along the way. You will however emerge stronger and more knowledgeable from them, as long as you see them for what they are, learning opportunities. So deep breaths, make that cup of tea and know that this is still an important part of your journey.

For those of you mid-trip here are some things I learnt somewhere post registration

Remember you are part of a system at every level and take the time to understand how it works

It was only when I started on my leadership journey as part of the GOSH Gateway to Leadership programme, that I really began to appreciate the importance of systems. As a trainee I was very focussed on my department, with a few links to my professional community at a national level, via the Association of Clinical Biochemists and Laboratory Medicine. It was only when I was on this cross disciplinary programme that I met people who were outside of my silo that I began to understand what the drivers for other peoples behaviour might be.

Now I spend a lot of time in national strategic committees and working with different professional backgrounds and it has enriched not only my practice, but also enabled me to work towards impact on a level I could never achieve as an individual. If you really want to be a driver for change then understanding the landscape within which you are working and making those changes will only make you more successful.

Influence is not about seniority

For a long time when I was starting out I believed that titles and seniority were key to influencing others and therefore supporting change and improvements. It took a while for me to learn about the difference between formal authority and informal authority. Informal authority is actually really key in order to win people over and get engagement with proposals. It’s built up over time, requires work and effort to maintain and is based on your credibility. Formal authority is given to you in the form of job title and role. You can make huge impact where ever you are RIGHT NOW, you don’t need to wait to be given authority. Put in some time and develop the informal authority to enable you to make things happen.

Don’t compete with anyone but yourself, your journey is your own

The world of Healthcare Science is a small one, it can feel like everyone is trying for the same end points and therefore is competing over the same limited opportunities. In my opinion this isn’t actually the truth. It feels like it, but it isn’t. When you speak to people, very rarely do they want the exact same thing as you. This competitive drive can mean that as a community we don’t support each other enough. Once you realise that others are not really competition, it dawns on you that your only competition is actually yourself. You can tick the boxes you need to tick with principles and grace, these don’t require anyone to lose out. Also, if we do these things as a community together we also often achieve more. If we form FRCPath study groups to help us pass then we are not losing out on consultant posts, as more people have FRCPath, we are increasing our chances of succeeding together. There will be enough consultant posts as we are not all looking for the same things in a job, the ideal post for one person will not be the same for another. Don’t spend too much time focussed on what others are doing and achieving, keep an eye on your road map.

We rise by lifting others

Part of succeeding as a community is to really function as a community. Twitter and #IBMSChat are great examples of this, sharing opportunities, knowledge and experiences for the good of everyone. No matter where you are with your journey there will be people behind you who you can sign post and offer support to. This is part of the reason I believe outreach and public engagement is so important, we need to support people at all parts of their pathway.

The other thing is, that it is crucial that as your formal authority increases you consciously make the decision to send the elevator back down, or ride share where you can. As leaders we are obliged (in my opinion) to amplify the voices of those who may not otherwise be heard. If you are lucky enough to have a voice then you need to use it, not just for yourself, but for everyone that either doesn’t have one or holds one that is unheard or ignored.

You will never be liked by everyone, and that’s ok

Amplifying the voice of others or being a driver for change, frequently does not increase your popularity. I’ve always been a people pleaser, I want people to like me, I want positive feedback, I want positive reinforcement. Sadly I have discovered that not everyone is going to like me. I am not going to be everyones favourite person. Being someone who likes change and disrupts the status quo will lead to benefits, but will also make people feel uncomfortable and that will sometimes drive challenging behaviour. Sometimes clinically it’s also my job to hold the line, to deliver bad news, to not be the popular one. Not everyone is going to like me, but I’ve discovered that it is rarely personal. It’s mostly about the response to the role or the situation and some key learning for me has been learning to separate these from who I am, in order to not take it personally.

What to do when you hit your original destination

Know your why, why are you doing this? What are you passionate about? Where are you going?

When you reach your planned destination, there’s only one thing to do and that’s plan for the next stop along the way. It’s really important therefore to check in with yourself and know your why? Why did you pick this original target and how are you now going to build upon all of the hard work that has got you to this point? What is your driving purpose and how are you going to stay true to that in the next phase of your career?

It’s worth doing some of this thinking as you approach your destination so that you can be ready once you’ve re-stocked on drinks, snacks and mix tapes/downloaded Spotify playlists to hit the road again.

Sit back, smell the roses and take time to celebrate

Finally, to complete the metaphor. It’s important to look in the back mirror every now and again to assess just how far you’ve come. Celebrating can feel indulgent and like boasting, in fact it’s the opposite. It’s inspiring to those that are following behind you and is important to show to others that they to can achieve. People can’t be what they can’t see and so by talking about the journey you will enable others to make informed choices about their own. On long journeys it can feel like you still have miles to go but by looking back you can see how far you’ve come and put it into some kind of context.

I’ve been listening to Hamilton a lot lately and these words have a particular resonance for me. Whatever your journey, it is yours and no one elses, therefore it will come together at the time that is right for you. So celebrate the moments, large and small, after all the journey is most of the fun.

I am the one thing in life I can control
(Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it)
I am inimitable
I am an original

I’m not falling behind or running late
(Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it)
I’m not standing still
I am lying in wait (Wait, wait, wait)

Wait For It – Hamilton

All opinions on this blog are my own

A Trip Down Memory Lane: Top tips I’ve learnt over 20 years of event organising

girlymicro Education, General

Its 6am and I’m back into the groove work wise post holiday. That means, for me, that I need to get prepared to run 2 one day conferences in a week in the first week of October. In many ways this is a foolish endeavour, but due to SARS CoV2, delays and the impending clinical business of winter it seemed the only way. As these events loom therefore I will be calling upon 20 years of organising events, both big and small, in order to try to make them a success.

I haven’t always worked as a scientist, I know, shocking! For a very small window between my BSc in zoology and starting an MRes in Biophysics I worked for Birmingham City Council in a couple of roles. One of those was as an event planner. I cannot tell you how brilliant that job was, some days I can’t believe I left, but deep down science was always my calling.

When organising an event there are some decisions you need to make early on. The big one being whether you are going to organise it yourself or outsource it to someone else, be that a company, venue or individual.

The decision about whether to outsource or not depends on a number of factors:

Manpower – organising events is time consuming and for very large events I.e. large conferences, you are unlikely to have the capacity to do this by yourself. I usually draw the line at events of over 350 to organise with a small voluntary working group, but it depends on the event and how much cat hearding is required

Infrastructure – do you have access to IT and other support to permit registrations, have a Web presence etc. In some ways this is less of an issue these days with platforms such as Eventbrite but they will take a cut of any charged ticket. You will also need to have things like a bank account that funds can be paid into, which can be problematic depending on who you are organising for with budget codes etc. If you don’t have the ability to register attendees you may have to find a partner organisation.

Finance – Obvious I know but events cost money. Some of the ones I’ve organised (especially the ones I’m running in October) make a considerable loss as they are about giving back, sharing knowledge, and developing networks etc. Some non work events I’ve helped run have been focused on breaking even with profits donated to Charity. There are others that have needed to make money in order to justify their existence. How much money you have to spend or need to make will dictate how much outsourcing is appropriate/possible and is more common for events that need to make money or at least break even, as these tend to link to scale.

Marketing – Do you have preexisting networks or links for you to be able to use to reach potential attendees? Twitter networks? Professional body mailing lists? If not then you may need external support or advice on how to get your event info to reach the people who might be most interested in it. Again, this is usually more important if you are trying to run a for profit where you needs 1000s to attend. It is certainly less of a concern if you’re organising a hen do.

Designing your brief

Start with your why. Who are you organising this event for? What are you trying to achieve? Are there learning or other outcomes, such as the bride having fun, that you need to achieve? Whichever way you decide to go in terms of organisation you will need to have a clear brief in your mind linked to these questions and others in order to decide what you want your event to be. You’ll need this for yourself if you are making your own decisions, but you will need it to even get a quote for an external events company. Spend some time doing your thinking here and you will save yourself a lot of drama later on.

You need to decide:

  • How many people i.e. small family event for 8 or large conference for 5000, plus everything in between
  • Catered or not. Short meetings may not need full catering, if you are organising an event with food what might the dietary requirements look like, how long will you be giving for breaks as this will impact on what type of food you can provide, is it a formal event as food will need to match this etc
  • Is onsite accommodation required? This is more common for multi day events, or scenarios where people will be coming from further afield i.e. weddings, or international meetings
  • What feel are you trying to achieve: formal, informal, networking focused
  • What level of technical support do you need: audio-visual, ticketing etc
  • Always bear in mind accessibility requirements, especially if you are organising a public event. This doesn’t just mean in term of physical access to spaces but to the content that will be provided. I run small loss making events so I can’t address this the way I’d like but you should be aware of the limitations of what you can provide
  • Who are your target audience? Where are they based? What links do you have with them? How will your achieve your objectives with them i.e. lectures, group work, open circulation?
  • How will you evaluate the event and what does success look like?

Your brief will dictate:

Room type and number required I.e. are you going to have breakout sessions or lectures or both

What kind of seating you want i.e. for lectures you might want lecture type seating, if you are having a networking event then cabaret might be more appropriate, or if the focus is on a larger single group working together then board room might work best.

Food choices, the more formal the event the more formal the food. It would seem really odd to have silver service in the middle of a conference day for instance.

Venue is everything

If you find the right venue to fit your brief (either yourself or via a planner) everything else becomes much easier. As we are a small team we tend to go for venues that can offer a package of support i.e. they come with furniture, audio visual options, flip charts and other paraphernalia and most importantly (as catering is super important to participant experience) good and plentiful food options. Your choices will vary dependent on whether you have greater resource either in money or time than we do. Knowing your ask means that you can find the right fit for you.

Find your team

If you are going to go it alone in terms of organisation then you need to find your team. This is true whether you are organising a group outing for friends or a work event. The kind of team will depend on the people who are doing the event planning. Some events benefit from creative disagreement to ensure inclusion. For the most part I like to work drama free as organising these events with limited resource is stressful enough. I therefore try to find people to work with who are interested in collaboration and are focussed on task completion. This works well for the type of events I’m currently involved with, but there are definitely events where innovation of process during the planning is part of the learning (such as nosocomial) and these require more risk taking and creativity.

Some scenarios also mean that there is less choice about who forms part of the the group. It is therefore crucial that whatever group you end up working with it is important that you have an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of everyone so that you can maximise the efficiency of the group and minimise frustration. There are things I’m really good at, I can hold a vision in my mind and have ideas. I need someone in the group therefore who grounds me and keeps me to task and deadline. It also helps if everyone has the same passion for the work as you do, or at least are equally committed. Uneven distribution of workload is one of the things that inevitably leads to stress in these settings.

Evaluation

One final and yet super important thing is to plan as part of the process how you are going to evaluate both the event and it’s impact. Learning is key. Did you participant love/hate the venue? It will impact on whether you will use it again. Did the delivery set up facilitate the learning needs? Did the agenda fulfil the brief? You are bound to do this more than once, even if not for the same event. Learning what went well and what could be improved is important in order to get better at this. Also understand that you will never please everyone, don’t take criticism to heart, you have put yourself out there and done something. Use comments as learning not as judgement.

That said if you want to join me at either of our upcoming events you can judge me against this post and see how well I/we stack up

Environment Network 2021: Designing and building for infection prevention – 8th October, London

Healthcare Science Education 2021: The role of innovation in education – 4th October, London (free)

All opinions on this blog are my own

If you would like more tips and advice linked to your PhD journey then the first every Girlymicrobiologist book is here to help!

This book goes beyond the typical academic handbook, acknowledging the unique challenges and triumphs faced by PhD students and offering relatable, real-world advice to help you:

  • Master the art of effective research and time management to stay organized and on track.
  • Build a supportive network of peers, mentors, and supervisors to overcome challenges and foster collaboration.
  • Maintain a healthy work-life balance by prioritizing self-care and avoiding burnout.
  • Embrace the unexpected and view setbacks as opportunities for growth and innovation.
  • Navigate the complexities of academia with confidence and build a strong professional network

This book starts at the very beginning, with why you might want to do a PhD, how you might decide what route to PhD is right for you, and what a successful application might look like.

It then takes you through your PhD journey, year by year, with tips about how to approach and succeed during significant moments, such as attending your first conference, or writing your first academic paper.

Finally, you will discover what other skills you need to develop during your PhD to give you the best route to success after your viva. All of this supported by links to activities on The Girlymicrobiologist blog, to help you with practical exercises in order to apply what you have learned.

Take a look on Amazon to find out more

What I Did On My Holidays: Or the benefits of taking some away from it all

girlymicro General

It’s Thursday night and I’ve been working for over 12 hours already in a desperate attempt to see the bottom of my inbox before I go. I have 45 left in my action folder and have reduced the inbox itself from 1250+ to 0. Sounds great, right? It definitely is but the act of getting to this point has left me so wound up about what I might have missed that I’m in a bit of a panic that I’ve forgotten something crucial. I’m thinking from the graph below that I’m not the only one who finds the build up to stepping away super stressful. So in an attempt to persuade myself of the benefits of a break and to lull my brain into some form of relaxation I’m going to focus on why holidays and taking time away from the inbox is so important.

As I write this my out of office is on. It says that I am away and will not be accessing emails whilst I’m away. More than that it states that I will delete any emails that arrive before I return from holiday, with a request that if it is still going to be relevant the sender should re-send after my return date. For many years I took laptops and phones away with me, in recent years I’ve decided that I will no longer do that. I can’t trust myself to not take it out and just ‘take a quick look’ or ‘do one quick thing’. Before I knew it I had always spent every day of my leave working and came back more frazzled then before I went. If the opportunity presents itself I will also become the person who is a walking version of the tweet below.

The ‘I will delete’ section comes from the fact that I will return to over 1000 new emails. My diary for when I get back is already full to bursting, from all the meetings I have to squeeze into less time because I’ve been on leave. This means that I will have A LOT of emails and no actual time to read them. I may or may not delete the intervening ones, but this message means that if anything is important it isn’t up to me to email dive to find it, it’s up to the sender to re-send. This means that when I come back I will panic less about the amount of time it will take me to catch up with having been away.

So given that even the process of going away drives me to a special level of stressed out, why am I doing it?

I think everyone in healthcare is run down and tired. When I’m this tired I lose the capacity to put things into perspective, everything is a disaster, my anxiety levels go up and I find it hard to see the wood for the trees. Going away and spending some quality time with my family enables me to recharge. It helps ground me and reminds me of what’s important. It enables me to become something other than Dr Cloutman-Green and spend time laughing, reading books, indulging in bubble baths and possibly even managing to have a lie in past 6am.

Letting my brain experience other things and stepping away from the day job also allows me to recharge my creative batteries. I come back able to look at problems from a different perspective, increasing my chance of solving issues. It also enables me to get inspired and remember why I have the best in the world, in order to help me plan and engage with change with a re-energised passion. Within 48 hours of being away I always have so many thoughts and plans that bubble up due to having a change of scenery. It’s another reason why I have to leave the laptop behind, as otherwise the urge to act on them immediately is too great. I keep a notebook to write them down so I don’t fear forgetting them but then can move onto the next book. It makes me better at my job when I return.

Not only is it good for me but it’s good for my team

It’s really easy to fall into a trap where you feel like if you aren’t there things fall apart. To be honest for me it’s less about this but my imposter syndrome telling me that if I’m not there to catch and double check myself people will find that I’ve made some huge mistake (let me be clear I’ve never found this to be the case – it’s why it’s irrational). It’s really important for me to go away and find that this doesn’t happen. It’s a little bonkers I know, but the more tired I am the more this fear grows, and the harder it is to step away and become less tired. It is quite the cycle, but knowing that it exists is 50% of the battle of controlling it.

Although I fear stepping away it’s easy to ignore the opportunity that this gives to my team(s) to try things out, to take on tasks or sit on meetings that they don’t always have access to. It gives them experience of a slightly different role to decide whether they enjoy it and supports their career development and networking. We are a team and I am not a one woman army, so it’s important to acknowledge that.

Not only is stepping away a development opportunity for teams, it is also a needed piece of leadership by example. I would hate anyone I work with to feel they can’t take breaks and recharge. I don’t want them working stupid long hours and fearing what happens if they are not ‘always on’. I need to lead by example and therefore give implicit permission that others also fully step away. For example I took the ‘I will delete’ message from my Clinical Lead. She led by example and I therefore feel able to adopt her practice. I want to make sure I also lead by example.

Finally, it makes me a less grouchy human being! When I’m tired, like many people, I get tetchy, read more than is meant into communication and frankly don’t communicate as well. My patience and tolerance become stretched wafer thin. I think that everyone around me has a much better experience of working with/living with/being friends with me when I’m refreshed, recharged and ready to go.

On that note this is my final job of the day, apart from packing and all that jazz, so I’m outta here.

See you all when I get back!

All opinions on this blog are my own

Keeping Things in Perspective: My attempt at seeing the glass as half full with a list of pandemic positives

girlymicro General, Microbiology (Clinical)

It’s been a long 18+ months in the world of Healthcare Science and Infection Prevention and Control. I’ve posted quite a lot about the pandemic here and how hard it’s been, especially coming into winter and the challenges that will bring. Challenges now acknowledged, it’s a Friday night, I have music playing and so I also wanted to reflect on what the pandemic has brought us that isn’t all negative.

Raised the profile of my profession

For many years I have had to try to explain what my job involved to the public, explain what polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and I’ve frequently been met with slightly glazed expressions. This is no ones fault, it’s just that those terms haven’t really meant anything for most peoples day to day life until the last couple of years. Suddenly public interest and awareness in not only testing and infection control, but also in the science behind these processes, has really been increased. Now I can hardly ever get a cab without being asked about how things work and what the current clinical situation is. If we engage well with this interest and awareness we will be able to have conversations about science and its impact on individuals and society for years to come, in a way we haven’t been able to before.

We’ve been invited into the room

Despite my love for my subject, microbiology has never been a sexy discipline. It’s never a topic that gets you into many strategic meetings where key decisions are being made, pathology as a whole is often left out in the cold when big decisions happen. Suddenly pathology, and microbiology in particular, have become a focus for decision makers. Healthcare Scientists as a professional group have often struggled to be invited to meetings, or even know that they were occurring. There has been a definite pivot over the last 18 months, with consideration of the importance of diagnostics in patient management. 80% of patient pathways rely on diagnostic impact at some point, it’s logical therefore that pathways can’t truly be optimised without considering diagnostics. So I for one am happy about the fact that by having a seat at the table we can work together to make this better, not just for SARS CoV2 but across all patient pathways.

The scientific and infrastructure legacy

Implementation of research techniques into clinical settings is always challenging, it requires access to space, finances and expert knowledge. We’ve always been very fortunate in the NHS, in that we have a lot of wonderful scientists who are really well placed to respond to scientific and clinical challenges by not just improving what they have, but by bringing in the latest research approaches. The things we have always struggled with are access to financial support to develop services and space in which to locate the new platforms required. One thing that has really struck me over the last 18 months is that the conversations in this regard have changed. Instead of flat out no, the discussion is about which is the best way forward and how can we make it work. This doesn’t mean that the answer is always yes, but it means that many of us have access to the infrastructure we need to really maximise patient care. The big question for us all now is how we maximise the legacy of that infrastructure to improve across challenges when this particular one is less enormous. This is a great problem to have and we need to ensure we actually spend some time thinking about the answer, rather than drifting into a solution.

Developed networks across boundaries and silos

It’s too easy in times of challenge and stress to react by becoming insular and regressing into known comfortable places, reinforcing silos and boundary based working. One of the things I’m proudest of for my profession and clinical colleagues is that instead of regressing into the known during the pandemic, they have instead reached across divides in order to form networks and learn from each other. This can’t have been easy to manage and yet the impact this has made has been really clear to me. At no time before as a scientist have I have been at a table with so many different professions, all with their own expertise, discussing, listening and learning from each other. I really hope that those networks and relationships that have been forged under such pressure will continue when we move back to a more standard healthcare model, as being part of those discussions has given me real pleasure.

I’ve got to know my colleagues much better

I am fortunate enough to be part of some exceptional teams (research, HCS education, IPC and microbiology). I’m not saying that the pandemic hasn’t on occasions challenged us and relationships within those teams, how can it not. The gift of those challenges has been however that we have come to know and understand each other in a way that would never have occured in a more standard situation. I spend more time with my teams than my family, I’ve known many of them for over 10 years, in many ways they are parts of my family. I’m super grateful therefore for the way we have bonded and deepened those relationships over the last 18 months, and it will only make us stronger to face whatever challenge happens next.

I’ve learnt so much about myself and my preferences/drives

Not only have I learnt more about my colleagues, but I feel I’ve learnt an awful lot about myself. The things that really matter to me, the things that drive me, the things that energise me and the things that drain me. For instance I have learnt that for me planning for the future is energising, whilst existing in constant responsive mode is draining. I miss sitting and planning research events, outreach events, teaching and developing the service. All of those things fuel my need for creativity and change. Living every working day in responsive mode where non of those things can happen I find incredibly draining, which is why my battery feels constantly empty. It’s why this blog has been a lifeline, even though it time consuming and yet another thing on my to do list.

The other thing I’ve learnt about myself is that despite appearances I’m more of an introvert than I knew. I’ve loved just spending time at home with my husband and not having the demands of a social life. I always knew that I could turn on ‘extrovert me’ for a given number of hours but then would reach a point where I needed to stop. Now I’ve discovered how happy and comfortable I am without the need to deal with those social demands in my world. I think I may try to keep my limited social circle up for some time to come as I feel happier and less anxious in small groups.

I’ve learnt so much and upskilled in so many areas

I didn’t realise until I came to sit down and write this blog how many new experiences I’ve had as a result of the pandemic that I would never have experienced otherwise. I’ve been involved with a life drawing class posing (fully clothed) as part of their pandemic professionals series. I’ve has my COVID-19 dreams painted as part of the Dream Appreciation process by DreamsID, the product of which I not only have for my office as an amazing piece of art, but has also been exhibited at the Freud Museum in London as well as other places. I’ve even been persuaded to take part in a stand up comedy show after training for National Pathology Week. These experiences have all developed skills and left me with memories that will last far longer than the pandemic. Many of them would never have happened if it wasn’t for the pandemic pushing creativity and causing people to work and develop projects in new ways. Even this blog was started as a way of being able to still channel creativity and sharing in the pandemic. So I guess I’ve learnt a lot, and not just about viruses.

Enjoying the genius of responses from companies and professional bodies

This may be a weird one but I have rather enjoyed seeing companies and other professional groups trying to come to terms with the pandemic. It’s been really interesting and enjoyable for me to see people tackle difficult and sometimes repetitive messaging in a way that brings humour or innovation into the mix. I’ve also found it pleasing when big business or big names have channelled some of their resources into learning and other messaging to support the pandemic approach. It has often renewed my faith in mankind when other sections of the population have been busy destroying it.

Leicester General Hospital Genius Signage

If we can survive this we can deal with anything that’s thrown at us

Finally, I think it’s easy to forget how much we’ve achieved and how far we’ve come. No matter what your job, or the reason you’ve spent a few moments of your valuable time reading this blog – know that you have come far, that you have achieved much and that you are making a difference and having an impact. Sometimes you just need to step far enough back that you can see it. So thank you, all of you.

All opinions on this blog are my own

Fulfilling A Promise: Why we need to talk about whether we are actually delivering on patient centred care

girlymicro General, Microbiology (Clinical)

Warning – This is a long one and I’m not even a little bit sorry as I think we need to talk about this

Lets get this bit but out of the way first. I don’t believe that any of us for one second mean to provide anything less than the best care we are empowered to give. I do however believe that there are a couple of key components that may mean that we don’t always provide the care we aspire to. In my head there are three key reasons behind this:

  • Empowered to give is the key phrase here. Are we supported in delivering the best care? Do we have the right staff, equipment, training etc?
  • Does the organisational culture support delivery of patient centred care, in terms of high level decision making, expectation setting and provision to challenge?
  • Are we as individuals aware of the behavioural patterns we fall into during times of stress i.e. if we trained during a hierarchical medical era is this where we shift to in our practice in times of psychological challenge, such as a pandemic?

This post isn’t a criticism of individuals or centres, but it is a challenge to ensure we are thinking and questioning as part of our everyday practice. An encouragement to question whether we are providing the best in patient care, or at least actively identifying areas where the system has fallen down. We can only improve if we question, question ourselves, the situation and the system.

So why am I posting this now?

I’ve had more to do with being on the other side of healthcare than I’d like over the last three weeks. The outcome was pretty dire and I made a promise to the amazing person who was the patient that I would use whatever influence I have to remind people that we get the principles of person centred care wrong it is the patient that suffers. In my case it meant that the patient suffered loss of dignity and the final weeks of their life without the support of family and friends.

I work in paediatrics and I must admit I had fallen into the trap myself of thinking that every world was like my world, not that I’m claiming my world is perfect. Paediatrics is however more family focussed by it’s very nature as we need families to support us in providing care. We also need to listen differently as many of our patients can’t articulate their clinical condition and so the input of non verbals and families into their care is especially important. My sojourn in the world of adult healthcare was therefore a considerable shock to my system and has left me both reeling and questioning my own practice.

Impacts on dignity and right to choose

The NHS Constitution clearly sets out key principles that we should be using in all of out interactions, with each other and with our patients. These include clear statements on respect and dignity. For us really to fulfil this pledge though we need to hear what patients are saying to us.

For example, if as part of a patients’ care they are experiencing loose stools and they are not supported to access the bathroom, and instead left lying in a contaminated bed, they will not only be at increased risk of infection (from the femoral line they have in), but they are also likely to become less compliant with their care in general. Are we under these circumstances really demonstrating through our actions that we care for the patient in front of us?

As healthcare professionals we are often a bit non-plussed about faecal contamination, for those not in our world however we need to remember that to many individuals this is a humiliating event. If we compound scenarios like this with not explaining why medically we are making it worse by adding in medication, such as laxatives, which make the situation more likely to reoccur, then are we really thinking about how we are impacting on patients psychological health, or undertaking holistic healthcare?

Is this really seeing patients as equal participants in their care choices if we aren’t giving them the information to inform those judgements?

Too often we make decisions based on our knowledge and do not engage with the patients and families in front of us in order to support their engagement with their own care. How often do we ask them what matters to them? Only by asking this question can we establish what dignity and the right to choose really means for the patient impacted.

Importance of communication assumptions about levels of understanding

Communication is especially important right now. Due to the pandemic patients are frequently isolated from support mechanisms. This lack of support may mean they don’t challenge their care, it also means if that challenge is unheard that they don’t necessarily have access to escalation procedures, or even worse access to sign posting about what to do next. They are effectively in a very lonely bubble, with the only people to support them a bunch of strangers who may or may not have the time to develop connections or truly support.

When I was finally allowed to visit the healthcare centre (a story for the next section) not a single person, apart from the palliative care team, introduced themselves until the last day when to be honest it all felt too late. Not one ‘hello my name is’, not one explanation to the person before them or us their family as to why they were there and what they were doing. Because of my job I felt like I could explain things and to ask the questions that needed asking, but most people do not have a healthcare professional as part of their family. This was apparently the way the whole episode of care had occurred. I thought we had come so far in terms of not just seeing patients as anatomy and conditions, but this just showed me how wrong I was. On the day of his death everyone was brilliant, supportive and demonstrated amazing communication skills (apart from the medics who didn’t even come in) but the impact of those skills would have been so much greater if used when someone was able to respond and participate.

The Palliative Care and Support team came to visit on the day before he died. They said ‘hello my name is’, they didn’t however explain what palliative care was or even really check my family knew what the reality of that visit meant. When I spoke to my family after they had gone they were shocked when I explained. We have to remember that not everyone lives in a world where those words have meaning, we need to stop hiding between titles as barriers and truly check that what we believe has been heard is actually what was received. The other extreme is the ‘infantilising nature of healthcare’ where we assume that people don’t have the knowledge and capacity to be involved in their care or decision making. It takes time to get a feel for the level of a patients engagement/understanding and pitch your content appropriately. Some patients have a considerable amount of knowledge about their own condition, but whatever their level of knowledge we should be talking to people at the level that is appropriate for them, not what is appropriate for us.

Long and short is that I’m saying how we communicate matters, not just what we communicate, and that we should all spend time (me included) reflecting on how we do this in practice. I’m as guilty as anyone for rushing in, delivering the information in my head and then rushing onto the next task, but is that what is actually needed of me? Take the time to get patients names right, learn who they are not just the reason for admission, and make sure we communicate in a way that works for them.

See the source image

Who are we making COVID-19 decisions for?

The hospital in which all this occurred has banned all visiting because of COVID-19. Not only that, they had removed all entertainment centres, and thus a big means of distraction, for all patients. This may seem really trivial, what does it matter if someone can’t watch TV. It matters because England got to the European final and football, as trivial as it may seem, is super significant in some peoples identities. Dying without being able to engage in one of the few seminal moments you are still able to experience is significant. It matters because if you have unexpectedly found out you have only weeks to live and you have no visitation to provide support then distraction is probably one of the few things that may aid you processing that information.

The same hospital that banned visiting had less than 20% of the staff on the ward wearing masks. If a patient is in a cubicle I can see no barrier to visitation from an IPC perspective, just get them to wear a mask. If we are insisting on banning visitation in order to prevent in-patient acquisition then staff need to be also protecting their patients. If staff are not wearing masks and protecting their patients then I question what is the point in banning visitation? Who are we protecting? What is the purpose of this policy that leaves someone at the worst time of their lives alone without support?

Visitation was allowed during end of life care. Sadly end of life care wasn’t from the moment they said you were going to face a life limiting condition, it was for the hours/days where death could be imminent. Sadly it is during these times when the patient themselves becomes less cognisant of their surroundings. It is beyond the time when you can have conversations about wills, final wishes, funeral arrangements. It is passed the time you can have most impact in terms of psychological support. Visitation also involved battling every day at reception for the password to be permitted to visit. Battling because no one had ever put the name in the book that allowed them to issue it. Delaying by 15 to 30 minutes when you would get to the ward. Extending a period of incredible stress as you wouldn’t know what you might find. All because no one had filled in a form. I of all people understand how busy everyone is and that it seems like a minor thing, but I can tell you as the person who uncharacteristically could have screamed at a stranger in those moments, a minor thing for us can have significant consequences for others.

So after this outpouring which I’m hoping will make us all think, what do I believe that we should be doing differently, myself included:

  • Make every conversation and encounter matter. Think about what you are delivering and how it has been received, has it been understood? Have we really listened to the response rather than just delivered information?
  • Even during a pandemic patients are more than their conditions. Against their will they are living in our world. A world that they don’t necessarily understand the rules or the language of. We are their translators, a key role that we need to understand we fulfil. Simple things like explaining our roles can make all the difference.
  • Challenge where needed systems and processes that don’t feel like they are supporting patient centred care. Sometimes the people making the rule/policy will not understand the true impact of it unless they get the feedback about it’s impact. We all need to be part of the change.
  • Take the time. Understand how you react to stress and how that response impacts on your practice. It’s hard to reflect on our practice right now but it’s rarely been needed more.

All opinion on this blog are my own