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

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!

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