Service Delivery Manager
Addenbrookes Hospital

Julie R

00:00:01 I manage the Admin team in the day surgery unit, and make sure that patients are booked and come in for their operations. I’m actually doing a secondment which is I’m away from my real job to gain more experience of managing teams and how the hospital works. I just like working in a hospital environment, because it feels like whatever you do you’re helping somebody else.

00:00:31 I left school at sixteen. I started a job as an office junior. You learnt so much about the organisation and how it worked, it was absolutely invaluable. Then I left to go and work at Acorn Computers, which was a horrible, horrible job. I was just sat in this corner of a room with all these people buzzing around everywhere – that is a big regret, that I left there and went to Acorn Computers.

00:01:04 I got a job at Leicester Royal Infirmary, it was just a little admin job, and that’s where my career’s really taken off. I had one Service Manager, and he said why don’t you think about doing a degree? And I was like – I couldn’t possibly do a degree. When I was young you didn’t go to college, here I was, x amount of years later, and it was like – well I couldn’t do a degree. I really didn’t believe that I could do a degree. I went and found out how to enrol for a business degree, and I did it part time and still worked here. The first day I just wanted to run. There was somebody who come and spoke to us on that first day, who actually completely and utterly motivated me, and I thought I can do this, I just have to try. And I loved doing it, because it definitely changed the way – the way I think about things.

00:02:04 I had a knack for understanding databases and Excel. They had an Information Officer job, which was about building a database to track all the transplant patients. Then I did that for two years. A job came up in Information Services that I applied for and I got. I was monitoring waiting lists, making sure that we meet all the Government targets. Once I got there, I thought I’d be really really happy and that would be it for the rest of my career. I’ve been there five years now, and it’s like what do I want to do, where do I want to go? So the secondment that I’m doing now is about whether I want to stay in Information or move on.

00:02:49 There have been two or three people that have influenced me. One was the service manager that encouraged me to do my degree, and made me kind of believe in myself. The Manager before the Manager that I’ve got now, she’s always said, ever since I’ve worked with her, that everybody else believes in me, but I possibly don’t believe in myself, and she’s made me try to overcome that and believe in my ability. I truly believe that if you come and work in the NHS, if you show initiative, and they know you’re going to work hard, it is an excellent place to work, because I started as and Admin Assistant and now I’m a Junior Service Delivery Manager. If you take the opportunities you can work your way up the ladder. I could be anything I wanted to be, I think, as long as I had the encouragement, and other people believed in me, which helps me believe in myself.

00:03:50 ENDS