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Articles by: Scott Heald

Collaborative leadership: Drawing on our different strengths to answer important questions

Following the publication of our Analytical leadership: achieving better outcomes for citizens report in March 2024, we are running a series of blogs to highlight examples of strong analytical leadership in practice. Analytical leadership is a professional way of working with data, analysis or statistics that ensures the right data are available for effective policy and decision-making to improve the lives of citizens. Everyone in government can demonstrate analytical leadership, regardless of their profession or seniority by drawing on the six enablers of analytical leadership and a ‘Think TQV’ approach.

Our latest blog in this series is from Scott Heald, Director of Data and Digital Innovation and Head of Profession for Statistics in Public Health Scotland (PHS). Scott offers his thoughts on the importance of collaboration as a key feature of analytical leadership in PHS, both with key external stakeholders, and internally between different professions. Scott highlights the value of bringing together staff from across professional groups to work together on important, cross-cutting questions, with each professional group playing to their strengths.

PHS’s work has clear relevance to our analytical leadership findings, particularly on how important it is to ‘Collaborate across organisations to add value’, but also to ‘Demonstrate transparency and integrity’ and ’Invest in analytical capacity and capability’.

My thanks to the OSR for asking me to write this latest blog on analytical leadership. I’ve focused mainly on the theme of collaboration as something which is crucially important for the delivery of our ambitions in PHS.

PHS is a relatively new organisation, formed in April 2020 with the ambition to improve the health and well-being of the people of Scotland.  PHS is a national health board which has dual accountability to national and local government in Scotland. Some of you may have heard of the Information Services Division (or ISD Scotland as it was more commonly known) – ISD was one of the bodies which formed PHS and with that PHS took on responsibility as the main producer of health and care statistics in Scotland.

I have been PHS’ head of profession for statistics since day one.  This was an important leadership role throughout the covid pandemic, working to ensure that our statistics continued to be produced in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics, and to the best levels of trustworthiness, quality and value.

PHS was certainly thrown into the spotlight on day one as the organisation was formed just as the pandemic was taking hold across the UK.  We had to contend with the inevitable growing pains of a new organisation forming (and all our staff working from home so no chance to bond in person!) but also had to rapidly respond to the needs of the pandemic, and to ‘Demonstrate transparency and integrity’ through regular statistical reporting, which had to be adapted regularly at pace to suit user needs and the reporting requirements at different stages of the pandemic.

The important work of producing statistics during the pandemic was a feature of recent sessions at the UK Covid Public Inquiry, which Roger Halliday (Chief Statistician at Scottish Government during the pandemic) and I gave evidence to back in January 2024.

Collaboration was key – I’m talking about collaboration with key external stakeholders, but also (and as important) collaboration internally within PHS between different professions.

PHS employs around 1,100 staff – around 700 of those work in data and statistics roles, but we also have clinical and epidemiological staff, colleagues who played a crucial role in the understanding of the pandemic – working together was essential and we definitely benefitted from data managers and statisticians working with epidemiologists and clinicians, with each professional group playing to their strengths.

And this “internal” collaboration continues today.  The pandemic certainly laid the groundwork for what we call cross-organisational programmes of work, which bring together staff from across all our professional groups to work together on key work areas such as cancer, mental health, drugs and alcohol, and NHS recovery.  The pandemic also highlighted key areas where there were shortcomings in the data that we had available, most notably data about primary care and social care services.  Work is underway today to address these issues and, again, collaboration is key – in particular with GP practices and local authorities across Scotland.

PHS worked closely with a whole range of partners during the pandemic, including the Scottish Government (where I jointly chaired a weekly data forum with my counterpart in SG to discuss and address the changing needs of policy officials and ministers, and worked to keep the production of statistics as orderly and transparent as we could – and that’s something I think we did really well under often intense scrutiny and pressure).  I worked closely with the other Heads of Profession in Scotland who were responsible for the statistics published by Scottish Government and National Records of Scotland, ensuring all our statistical releases were coordinated to minimise any confusion for users.  We also liaised with our counterparts across the UK, with Scottish data feeding into the UK Covid dashboard run by UK Health Security Agency every day.

Working with our local NHS Boards (there are 14 what we call territorial health boards which provide direct patient services) and local authorities (32 in Scotland) was important to understand and support their local needs – one example was working with our local partners to develop a community testing dashboard which brought together data from a range of sources (including wastewater) to rapidly identify covid “hot spots” which were developing in localised areas.

Working with academia was key too – many world-leading studies, particularly in our early understanding of the covid vaccination programme were driven by collaboration between PHS and key academic institutions across Scotland and the UK.  Providing researchers with access to data in a safe and secure manner continues to be an important part of our work and PHS is a key partner with Research Data Scotland whose remit is to make it faster and simpler to access public sector data for research.

PHS has also ‘invested in our analytical capacity and capability’, modernising our IT infrastructure, again in collaboration with another national NHS board called National Services Scotland which provides IT services for PHS.  In April 2023, we shifted entirely from propriety software to using R.

In summary, collaboration is absolutely critical in enabling us all to deliver the best statistical products we can.  The importance of cross-professional working was really driven home during the pandemic, and that continues today.  It’s really important that we don’t stay in our data and statistics silos and harness the greater power of our work through effective collaboration.

Finally, I wanted to mention the current consultation which PHS is undertaking to help us understand how our users interact with the statistics we publish.  We’d love to hear your views and would be grateful if you could spare a few minutes of your time to respond to our consultation (which runs until 27 September 2024):

It’s a real privilege to have my Director and Head of Profession role – I’m often asked what my dream statistics job would be and I can’t think of one better than my current post.  That said, if I was allowed to dream, those that know me know my absolute dream stats job would be compiling the weekly UK singles charts and then presenting them on radio 1!  My statistics and music worlds did collide after the Scottish Official Statistics conference in 2022 when I was tweeted by none other than Latin pop queen Gloria Estefan – but that’s a story for another day!

Blogs in this series:

  1. Fostering a robust government evaluation culture
  2. Transparency, integrity, and independence: the keys to improving Budget scrutiny and public understanding of risks to public finances
  3. Achieving linked data insights to improve lives: a leadership perspective
  4. Collaborative leadership: Drawing on our different strengths to answer important questions
  5. Ensuring that analytical leadership is fit for the future
  6. Demonstrating transparency and integrity to support public trust

 

Listen to your enthusiasts: Implementing RAP at Public Health Scotland

This is a guest blog from Scott Heald following the launch of our new report: Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP): Overcoming barriers to adoption.

Firstly, let me introduce myself. I’m Scott, the Head of Profession for Statistics at Public Health Scotland (PHS). PHS is a new body, formed in April 2020 (to lead on tackling the challenges of Scotland’s public health but dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic in our first year). Our RAP journey started when we were in NHS Scotland’s Information Services Division (ISD), the health and care statistics body which now forms part of PHS.

PHS, and ISD before it, has been a big fan of RAP from the beginning. I wanted to share our story, from a bunch of enthusiastic statisticians who convinced me it was the right thing to do (I didn’t need much convincing!), to embedding it within our organisation in our reporting on COVID-19.

Our RAP journey began with a programme of work to transform how we published our statistics.  It quickly became clear that the programme had to be as much about our processes for producing statistics, not just the final published output. More automation was key – to speed up processes, eliminate manual errors, and to release capacity to add value to our statistics. Greater job satisfaction for our statisticians was a welcome impact too.

“We don’t use that here”

Up till this point our software of choice was propriety standards. More and more graduates were joining our organisation and wondering why we weren’t using open-source software like R, having been taught it at university. I guess, in those early days, I was probably part of the “we don’t use that here” (partly out of fear as I had not personally used any of the new software they were talking about).

However, I was persuaded (and willing) for a group of our statisticians to show us what could be done using R. Long story, cut short, is that our group of enthusiasts showed the power of what could be done and PHS is now making the strategic shift to follow RAP principles as a way of working.

The art of persuasion

I’d describe our RAP journey as “bottom up”, with support from the “top down”. When we started seeing the results, we didn’t need much convincing. OSR’s report showcases our work on Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios – a quarterly publication which used to take five days to run (lots of detached processes, lots of room for error). I remember vividly the first time the team ran it the RAP way. Five minutes after the process started, the finished report was in my inbox. We couldn’t believe it! And, to be sure, spent the next five days running it the old way to make sure we got the same answers (we more or less did; the RAP way was more accurate, highlighting a few errors we fixed along the way!).

Our learning is that it’s a relatively easy shift for more recent graduates because they already know R. The focus for our training had to be on members of staff who have been with us for longer and weren’t familiar with it. And that can take some persuading – team leaders finding themselves managing teams who are using software they have never used themselves. We had to support and train at all levels (with tasters for managers who themselves may not need to delve into the finer details of R, but know they would know how to do it if they were doing their time again).

So, what have we learnt?

  1. Be prepared to try new ways of working
  2. Listen to your staff, who have a different perspective and fresh take on ways of working
  3. Start small – it’s easy to make the case when you can showcase the benefits of the RAP approach
  4. RAP improves the quality of what we do and eliminates errors
  5. Be prepared to invest in training – and recognise your staff will be in different places
  6. Use buddies – our central transformation team certainly helped with that, creating capacity in teams to RAP their processes
  7. Be open and share your code – we publish our code on GitHub, a great community to share ideas and approaches

Listen to your enthusiasts

OSR’s report highlights that we have a small central transformation team to support teams with their RAP work. This is crucially important as the initial work to RAP your processes can take time, so the additional capacity to support our teams to enable this to happen is a must. This initial investment is worth it for the longer-term gains. It’s not all about making efficiencies either. It’s about streamlining processes, reducing error, and giving our analysts job satisfaction. They are now able to add more value because they have more time to delve into the data and help users understand what the data are telling them.

Our focus on transforming the processes for our existing publications has stalled due to many of our staff being redirected to supporting PHS’s key role in Scotland’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a success of our RAP work is that many of our new processes required to produce our daily COVID-19 statistics are done using RAP principles – they had to be as we’re producing more statistics, more frequently than ever before. Our earlier use of RAP meant we were in a good place to apply the techniques to our new ways of working.

And my final bit of advice? Listen to your enthusiasts – I’m glad I did.