Blog by Samuel Moody

Samuel is an Internal Medicine Doctor working in various sites around the North of Manchester with a special interest in refugee health and the design and delivery of health-focussed interventions and programmes.

When was the last time you heard the term ‘portfolio career’?

This may be blinkered, through the constricted lens of clinical medical training, but the phrase reminds me of a particular stratum of workforce; MPs, with those unexplainably high-paid, two-day-per-month board positions, or those high-up ‘business consultants’ who can’t quite tell you in what it is they actually consult. In either case, it was never a term I thought I’d ever be using in my career.

But for some time now our approach towards health management has been changing - and with it, our approach to challenges, priorities and skill sets. The Fellowship, for me, is a sign of this change. It’s an opportunity to explore the same health issues I see every day but in a broader, population-oriented context: the perfect springboard into exploring a future ‘portfolio career’ of my own.

My project, with Bury County Council, is a deep dive into trust data with hundreds of thousands of datapoints collected about each person’s hospital admission. Under the guidance of the clinical teams involved, we are comparing data collected by secondary care referral systems (specialist systems used between hospitals) – to admission, demographic and deprivation-index data. From this, we map out a person’s journey through the hospital, and can compare health outcomes and mortality against variables such as ethnicity, deprivation and even a patient’s first language. My project, which is specifically looking at outcomes in certain cardiac conditions, is searching for relationships between these data to understand who has ill-health in the Bury community, then how we can better serve those affected whilst maintaining resource efficiency. I also aim to devise a blueprint for future work to assess data from any recorded hospital intervention in the same way.

The Fellowship isn’t my first dive into a portfolio career; I’ve worked across the private and charitable sectors in medicine and have previously held responsibility for tackling health inequalities. I’m therefore aware of the giant skills gap between clinical and public health, a gap that I’ve always wanted to bridge - and the fellowship is just that. It’s a top-down shift in the attitude we have towards healthcare in the UK; towards interdisciplinary collaboration, and equipping health staff with a broader skill set to address health challenges. It's also the first sustainable population-health programme that’s designed to not only work with, but support, working in the NHS. 

Using the skills I’m learning through the Fellowship, I’ll be able to work alongside Public Health specialists in a meaningful way not only to treat, but to assess the root causes of, and help prevent, poor health in the future.