Building trust in teams to accelerate the Covid-19 vaccine rollout
Now for something a little different! I love speaking to all our guests on the podcast. But chatting to Charlotte Bemand, who worked as a Programme Director on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in England, was a bit special.
Charlotte and her colleagues helped roll out the vaccine across England in just six and a half weeks—I repeat, six and a half weeks. That’s amazing. Her experiences on the COVID-19 project are incredible.
It’s hard to imagine the pressure Charlotte and others were under to get the Government’s vaccine programme up and running. But they achieved their goals. And they achieved them by leveraging the NHS ethos and building an atmosphere of trust and empowerment that’s truly inspiring. Now Director of Digital Product and Business Partnering at HBK, Charlotte shares her story.
How did you get involved in the vaccine rollout?
I was the operations director of an NHS Trust for several years. I’d worked in the NHS and healthcare for 10 years or so before going into other areas. I stepped into industry for a few years, then returned to the NHS and joined the vaccine programme in November 2020.
Once a vaccine had been approved, the task in hand was how to deploy it across NHS England. When I joined, Dame Emily Lawson, heading up the programme, and a team of about 400 people were building a national deployment programme for a vaccine once if/when it emerged. When I started, we didn’t know if an effective vaccine would even be found. That combination of uncertainty and urgency wasn’t like anything I’d experienced before. But our mission was to save lives by planning to get a potential vaccine out and deployed as soon as it arrived.
What were the programme’s steps at a high level?
Oh, crikey. There were many steps. At a high level, we were planning based on public health evidence, focusing on those who needed the greatest protection. Planning was age-based, prioritising the most vulnerable. We also had to consider deploying into a range of settings: care homes and the prison healthcare system, for example.
Remember that clinicians also needed to be trained and that support had to be given to people administering the vaccine. We were working with lots of unknowns. I think that in those six and a half weeks, we built around 1,000 services. These were all new contracted services to enable training, quality assurance, and supply chain management, among other things.
How did you ensure wellness and avoid burnout?
Everyone who came into this project was committed to getting the job done. And we quickly realised the project required 7-day working. We did rotational and on-call cover so that loads were spread. But I’ve got to say, the leadership team would check in on our wellbeing and see how we were doing. After we’d finished, one of the chief execs told me to take a month off work. I thought, no way, I’m fine. But they were right; I needed that period to decompress.
What were some of the big things you learned?
There is a need for clarity so everyone knows what they have to achieve. We had really good communication, with regular cadence and transparency coming from the top. It was truly agile and it was principle-driven in the way that the teams worked. We really used our agility to unblock problems and work with planning assumptions at a pace I’d not seen before.
Using the phrase “what needs to be true for this to occur” was helpful. “What needs to be true?” became a very focused way of summarising, you know, planning assumptions to discuss action for a particular outcome. It permitted people to present ideas and thoughts in a safe space.
What role did data play?
A lot of businesses use the term data-driven, but we really were. We took our planning assumptions and insights and built them into modelling scenarios to understand our operational capacity and how quickly we could deploy vaccines into different settings and reach different communities.
We were also very focused on monitoring vaccine uptake and did some interesting work around behaviour modelling. Conversations around creating walk-in services and how to create outreach services for different communities were all data-driven.
How was the team structured?
The vaccine program had a leadership team, but overall, the structure was incredibly flat. It was a very empowering culture where everyone was encouraged to participate and contribute. I saw that empowerment across different work streams and specialist areas.
What did it feel like to work on the team?
Even with the intense pressure, people would still give you some time. It might take 5-10 minutes to answer what would appear to be a stupid question, but people were still generous. They knew that if they invested that time, it would ultimately help us achieve our goals. And, you know what? People would check in with each other at the start of the day. They would ask how you were doing and things like that. We all need that.
What did you learn, and how do you now apply them?
What did you learn, and how do you now apply them?
Principle-driven teams with the freedom to iterate and access to a stream of good quality data are now critical success factors for me. And by principle-driven I mean teams who understand what we are trying to achieve and believe in the outcomes.
I hope that the teams I work with know there’s nothing off the table. That alone creates a safe space for people to share their fears and hopes and the reality of what we’re working on. As a result, people start to become more empowered and take forward the things they’re passionate about, the opportunities they see, and what they believe in. Just give people support.
Check out our podcast series to hear more from industry experts like Charlotte.