TheHill

Second Year MPhil, MPhil Medical Anthropology, Remote Working

Work Projects

TheHill is Oxfordshire’s health and care digital transformation catalyst. They work in Oxfordshire and across the Thames Valley with NHS Trusts, universities, digital developers, innovators and investors to promote and encourage commercial and impactful technological solutions to problems in healthcare.

During the COVID-19 pandemic TheHill was commissioned by Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust to analyse their changing use of digital technologies and innovation. The first phase of this project, marked by the production of a report for the OUH Trust, was just coming to completion as I joined TheHill for a two-month internship. This report informed the next phase of the project that I and another intern would be taking forward. One of the next steps involved showcasing any best practice of technologies and innovations that had been identified during phase one. For example, this may include how teams used digital platforms to achieve tasks remotely during COVID-19, or how clinical appointments were triaged as either appropriate for telemedicine or requiring face-to-face consultations.

In order to share this best practice, we organised and ran TheHill Learning Sets for OUH employees. Learning Sets act to bring people together to share experiences and learn from one another. As interns, we prepared all aspects of this remote learning set including inviting OUH employees, setting up the meeting, creating a presentation and prompts for topics of conversation, and having continued conversations with those that attended.

Another follow-on project was the collation of all innovations gathered from conversations with OUH employees. As part of this, an email address was set up by OUH for any employee to submit a digital innovation idea for the Trust. TheHill received these submissions and we categorised all ideas. We arranged and carried out follow-up conversations with all of these submissions, the majority of which were led by us as interns. These conversations were pivotal for us to suggest new pathways for innovation for the Trust and initiate the codesign process.

While many of these projects were collaborative efforts between me and the other intern, we both had independent roles within them and side-projects that we were working on. For

example, I analysed phase one information to discern contacts to gather patient feedback regarding telemedicine.

These provided me with patient viewpoints that TheHill hopes to showcase in the next output of the report. I received a good amount of support from TheHill however it felt less like support and more like a working relationship which was what I really enjoyed about this internship. I was given a lot of responsibility and could receive support from other employees whenever I needed but was given the freedom to take initiative myself and suggest how the project would develop.

Daily Life

This was a remote internship and the hours could be flexible dependent on when you preferred to work. In order to maximise my experience with TheHill, I made sure to work 9-5 on all days so that I could participate in all team meetings and have an experience as close as possible to a usual employee. Every day started at 9am with a daily stand up, this was a 15 minute meeting where everyone shared their plans and actions for the day and could ask the whole team any questions. This was a really great way to start the day and to gain knowledge of all projects going on within TheHill.

Most days I would have 2 or 3 other virtual meetings. Those specific to our project were held every other day and very much led by us as interns in order to ask questions and gain feedback on any work we had initiated or completed. Every week we had a team learning session where different aspects of TheHills work was discussed. For example, one week the Market Accelerator programme was discussed, in another the marketing team presented their KPIs and we even ran one session ourselves to showcase all the work we had done over the course of our internship. Other meetings were arranged ourselves as interns, often involving interviews with OUH employees, attending webinars and discussing possible development of our project with other team members within TheHill.

I really enjoyed working remotely as it allowed to me to work efficiently and have time for other commitments in the evening. It was also very useful as the very nature of our work involved us analysing remote working and consultations practices, and meant we were often facing similar issues. Therefore, working remotely gave us a commonality with all those OUH employees that we spoke to. Working remotely was made more effective by having another intern who I worked collaboratively with most days. This meant that the work felt more team led rather than a solo at-home project.

Lasting Impressions

This was definitely one of the most enjoyable internship experiences I have had. TheHill has a wonderful culture and environment, everyone was extremely friendly and supportive and I really appreciated the amount of freedom and responsibility that I was given throughout the internship.

I very much felt in charge of the project and that I was having an influential impact on the outputs. I have developed a range of skills including improving my verbal communication skills as the internship was remote and involved me carrying out interviews with OUH employees. Through the weekly team meetings, I learnt more about industry sectors, such as med-tech start-ups, marketing and the current changing role of grants in a Brexit era.

The experience has definitely confirmed my career ambitions to work in the healthcare sector and has enabled me to understand specifically what areas I might be more interested in. For example, I became more interested in the health communication and design side of the project during my internship.