What did you do in lockdown?
Did you sit on the sofa and put on weight? Follow the bloke on the telly, prance around yer sitting room in lycra and maybe, lose some weight?
Did you do homeschooling, brush-up-yer algebra? Past-particles?
Learn Latin, Tai-Chi, bake bread, dig out yer verruca? Meditate, vegetate or illuminate? Feed the birds, feed the foxes, feed the family… thank goodness for Deliveroo!
I know someone who did a Zoom, with one hand, trying not to look like they were eating a breakfast yoghurt and with the other hand, throwing a ball to entertain a bored dog…
… it was Victoria Betton. She is smart, sassy and knows her stuff. She used the unwelcome interregnum to write a book.
It’s called; Towards a Digital Ecology, NHS Digital Adoption through the COVID-19 Looking Glass.
That’s it, really. It’s all in the title.
Towards a digital ‘ecology’… note, not a digital technology. Digital ‘adoption’… taking something, as if it were your own. And, ‘through the Covid looking glass’… perhaps lens?
‘Through the looking glass’ brings a certain connotation.
Is it the old fashioned glass, a literary way to say, mirror? Or, is it more Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking-Glass, an 1870’s metaphor for; ‘the opposite of what is normal or expected.’
Actually, this book is all of those things.
Through the eyes and testimony of front-line workers, experts, serendipitists, hustlers, old-hands, new hands and just those-in-that-place-at-that-time.
Betton takes us on a journey, through Covid, that weaves its way through the Alice-World of the looking-glass, that is the NHS.
The NHS is Alice, full of good intentions, has trouble befriending the good guys and all too frustrated that the perceptions never match up to reality.
The Red Queen is the Department of Health, overbearing, unpleasant and hounding.
The White Queen, the industry, disorganised and messy.
The Red King, the Treasury, sleepy and all too ready to dismiss reality as the unreal.
The White Knight, noble and willing to write Apps and work into the night, for free, to solve the problems of the hour.
Throughout, there is the Jabberwocky, the lexicon of technology, the non-sensical words, the battle of good over evil.
These metaphors are mine, Betton’s book is far more direct, but they do serve to sum-up, what is a terrific book, insightful, grounded and is a must-read.
Excluding the superb index and referencing, the book is only 240 pages. I read it in one sitting.
I’m pleased I did. It’s a romp.
We are all too familiar with the tragedy of Covid but beyond that, now, we are coming to realise, unfettered by bureaucracy, government and the dead hand of management, the NHS responded, rejuvenated, innovated, pushed over walls and just got on a did stuff.
Betton takes us through all that.
She talks to the people who innovated. She has them tell us what it was like to gather a second wind and innovate across the kitchen table.
She finds the people and teases out of them where they found the energy to push over the walls and cross the boundaries.
This is not really a book about digital, or technology. It is not a book about Covid. It is a book about attitude, mindset and what it takes to make things work, get things done and all the things that stop all of that from happening.
It’s a book that subliminally asks the biggest question of all; what are we trying to do with digital?
And, very directly, where is the patient in all this, a voice so often drowned out by the feverish clicks of a keyboard and the enthusiasm of being able to do something… that in the end, no one wants.
This is a book for philosophers, for thinkers and people who want to do things right.
People who see the potential in being able to do what Amazon can do, what Google take for granted and FaceBook take in their stride… make technology work for them.
Betton tells us 30% of the world’s data is healthcare data and using it to make our systems faster, safer, cheaper is in our reach and…
…I believe her.
