Exploring new frontiers in healthcare innovation – #APACForum

Exploring new frontiers via Unsplash

As you may have guessed from my tweets the past couple of weeks, I am heading over to Sydney, Australia, next weekend to attend the APAC Forum 2016 (from September 12-14). I’m very excited to be attending this healthcare transformation & innovation conference, organized and hosted by Ko Awatea (my workplace) from Counties Manukau DHB.

It should be a fascinating conference, bringing together many world leaders in health transformation and innovation into one place to share, create, and remix ideas to offer better healthcare to all our patients. Part of my daily work is to help support the Allied Health professionals and project teams, so I’ve worked with a number of teams who are running health innovation projects, and using improvement methodology tools like PDSAs. I’m really looking forward to learning more about different methodologies, tools, case studies, and what other folk are doing around the world!

Below is a bit of a teaser tweet of what I’m looking forward to at #APACForum this year 🙂

https://twitter.com/jasmine_jenke/status/771149205272276992

I’m also looking forward to meeting lots of new people, and deepening existing relationships as well. I hope to blog again after the conference to share some of my key learnings from these three days. You can follow what’s going on at the conference by searching the #APACforum hashtag – if you are passionate about healthcare innovation & improvement, you can also sign up to support the Thunderclap!

A Thunderclap is like an online flash mob – sign up to show your support (using Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr), and an auto message will be posted at a prearranged time, along with everyone else’s messages who are supporting this campaign. 

Of shoes, and ships and sealing wax – curating @PeopleofNZ

Image by Alex Wong via Unsplash

I just spent a week curating the @PeopleofNZ Twitter account; it was awesome! [For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a rocur (rotation curation) account with a different Kiwi at the helm every week – you can sign up or find out more about it here. @Djpaterson is the very helpful admin.]

I had just a couple  three goals for this week:

1). Be an interesting and engaging curator; engage in conversations and reply to everyone (or at least like their tweet to let them know I saw it)

2). Be a bit of an advocate for libraries & libraries – or show the world what a real librarian is like 🙂 A little bit like that “living books” concept where you can go and ‘borrow’ someone for 10-15 minutes and have a chat with them

3). Not stuff it up/send out something hugely embarrassing or offensive to over 5K followers…

Hopefully I did all right on all three accounts – I didn’t get any bad feedback from people and several followers even un-muted the @PeopleofNZ account this week (so that’s good, right?).

I started the week off with a roar on Monday by introducing myself (as a librarian – technically even though my role is “Information Specialist”), and then opening the floor to ANY questions anyone had about libraries or librarians.

I got a range of [mostly expected] questions, including the best place(s) to buy pencil skirts and cardigans, the obligatory Dewey Decimal system questions, some about the stereotype and whether people perceive me as ‘boring’ when I introduce myself at parties, but also some really interesting ones about the future of the library in the digital age, ebooks versus physical [I love both :D], and beautiful libraries – there were some neat pictures shared.

Then I had to have a poll – my husband had corrected me quite recently on a phrase that I had been saying wrong for my entire life, and I just wanted to check if other people shared my mistake.

Ok – poll time [to settle an argument with the husband]. Which is the correct expression to use?

— @PeopleofNZ (@PeopleofNZ) July 18, 2016

It turns out Twitter agreed with him – had some long (and amusing) conversations with people about why “streaks ahead” was NOT the right phrase 😛 [I still blame the Kiwi accent…]

So polls seemed to be a fun way to go, so on Wednesday I quizzed people what they thought about Pokemon Go – I’d been away in Vanuatu for two weeks, completely off the grid with no Internet, and arrived back in New Zealand to a world playing Pokemon…

So Twitter – I'm curious – what do you think of #PokemonGO? #tech #fitness #WearableTech

— @PeopleofNZ (@PeopleofNZ) July 19, 2016

Turns out most people either loved it, or didn’t have the energy to hate it. Heard some cool stories about it getting kids outside and connecting with others – so probably being launched in the school holidays was a good idea 🙂 I even downloaded it, and have started playing it – finding it is helping keep my step count up a bit more during the day 😛 Also had some interesting conversations about data consumption, data collection (and what they do with the location data…)

Thursday was the day to give a bit of a plug for Creative Commons – most people got it right (or maybe I just suck at coming up with legitimate wrong multi-choice options) and had some more interesting conversations around that – one Tweeter had even met Lawrence Lessig – yay!

New poll for Thursday – what is Creative Commons? #cc #creativecommons

— @PeopleofNZ (@PeopleofNZ) July 20, 2016

There were also some other random conversations throughout the week, including snippets about the New Zealand International Film Festival, what we were cooking for dinner – I even got the recipe for a delicious-sounding butter lemon pasta!, and the wonderfulness of adult colouring books 🙂

And finally – here is my week in numbers (pulled together off a couple of Twitter analytic websites):

So all in all, I really enjoyed my week – thanks again to @djpaterson for giving me a chance at the account. And thank you to everyone who tweeted, voted in the polls, and talked with me – it was a great experience, and one I wouldn’t mind doing again 🙂

Looking back -#BlogJune wrap-up

Photo from Cole Patrick via Unsplash

So….

#BlogJune 2016 has finished (I know, I should be up with the times, but I’ve been away in Vanuatu, completely off the grid for two weeks, so just settling back into NZ life again :D). It’s my habit to write a bit of a reflection post at the end of the month, so here goes 🙂

In terms of numbers crunched, I published 9 posts – not as many as 2014 (didn’t do #BlogJune last year; trying to remember why?), but I’m happy with the out-put. I haven’t published many posts this year (apparently only 10!), so glad to get back into the habit of writing  I really do enjoy blogging; I’m just not always disciplined enough to put in the time to do it.

In terms of quality, I managed to blog relatively practically this year, and explore some thoughts about work which was really fun. It was great to reflect on things that I am learning and doing (particularly in the area of health librarianship), although it was also challenging to blog in an honest way about work while still being professional and positive. I’m sure everyone has issues and challenges in their workplace, but for me, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable discussing those on a public blog. I prefer to blog in a constructive way about what I’m learning/thinking/reflecting on at work, so that’s what I chose to share here.

Turns out my most popular post was about live-tweeting a design thinking workshop; this one certainly garnered quite a lot of attention on Twitter – not sure which aspect (live-tweeting or design thinking?) was most popular 🙂

And a few numbers here (for those interested in stats):

Some of the other highlights for me were just being able to read other people’s blogs, and follow their stories and thoughts and ideas – so much inspiration! I’ll have to go back and catch up on those posts that I missed in the flurry of #BlogJune 🙂

So what was the highlight for you from #BlogJune? What did you enjoy most? What did you learn? Did you surprise yourself? 🙂 I’d love to know…

A picture is worth a thousand words…

But what if the picture *had* words?

Meet ThingLink, which has been kicking around on the internet at least since 2010, but which I only discovered this week.

ThingLink is a “platform for creating interactive images and videos for web, social, advertising, and educational channels” – basically you can annotate your pictures and add links, videos, and other media directly into your image, which you can click on once you have hovered over the image.

Try mousing over my image below (of my poster for the Allied Health conference), and hovering over each spot on the image to read some more. You can also see the image full-size here on ThingLink itself.

At first glance, it seems a really cool tool that works well with visual images – maybe not with ones already quite text-heavy. I was looking through the featured images that use ThingLink and quite like these ones:

The truth about best before dates by Prajakta Dhopade

Or this one:

The Fault in our Stars by Alaina Pollock

At first glance, I really like this platform. It’s simple, easy-to-use, and the basic account is free. If you pay a little bit, you can customize the icons on the image, track statistics of how many people are clicking on the image, and where they are coming from, but the basic one is fine to play around with.

I’m just struggling to think of ways to use it in library promotion or information literacy instruction. I was tossing up using a screenshot of the library homepage, and maybe using some of these ‘annotations’ to help explain the main parts of the page, but I’m worried that might be a bit wordy. It might be fun to use it for book reviews (like the Fault in our Stars above), or maybe in a infographic style for our stats (maybe create an image on Canva or Piktochart, and then import it into this programme and annotate it), but I’d love to hear some more ideas of how to use it – or how you are using it right now!

So what do you think this could be useful for? How could you use it to spice up some of the promotional material in your library or social media posts? Or is it not the right tool for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts 🙂

What did you say? Working Out Loud

Photo by Linnea Sandbakk available on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking for a while about blogging about my work, tweeting about what I do at work, and how much I should share or what people would be interested in. I think it’s probably something that a lot of people think/worry about – how much should I share? Is this private/confidential? What if it’s critical about something at work – should I mention the things that I’m not entirely comfortable with or that I think should be changed? But to balance all these (legitimate) concerns, it’s also really valuable to share your work and what you’re doing with folk, to generate other ideas and discuss your thinking with a wider community. I suppose maybe some of my more recent posts (like this one about Design Thinking and live-tweeting – which was for a workshop at work) fall into this category of sharing my work.

And then I came across this tweet:

It's Working Out Loud week. Find out how to #WOL via @johnstepper https://t.co/v9YNWwg8Lu – inc his TED talk. #wolweek

— Rachel Miller, All Things IC (@AllThingsIC) June 8, 2016

And was introduced to the concept of Working Out Loud – see more of what it is in this graph here, and read this introductory blog post:

So basically, my understanding of it was that it was similar to what I was doing already, tweeting about what I was doing at work, thoughts about issues, articles, people that inspired me, blogging about those things, but being even more intentional about it – inviting others to contribute their opinions, organizing it in a way that is useful to others and to yourself, and maybe even taking it a bit further and setting up a WOL group of peer support, in your workplace or wider.

So what do you think about the concept? Do you already ‘work out loud’? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

10 things that energize me at work

Image by Aleks Dorohovich available from Unsplash

As a few others on #BlogJune have done, I’m going to blog today about the top 10 things that energize me at work. Thank you to Ruth Baxter & Katie Davis for your inspiration 🙂 So here’s 10 things that energize me at work (in no particular order):

1. Coffee breaks with friends – there’s something about the combination of a warm moccachino (yes, I know they’re not real coffees, but they are still my drink of choice :D) and chatting with friends at work (either about work stuff or other stuff entirely) that just helps reenergize me and get some other ideas flowing
2. Using pen on paper to write lists or to get my thoughts together. I find that working on a computer all day does not always help me to think creatively (and my eyes get sore – worn glasses since I was 4 :D). So having a wee break from the computer and going to pen and paper helps stoke the fires of creativity and envisage things in a new way.
   
3. Closely related to number 2 – use pens, colour and paper to mind map (and not just write things in a list format). You can see one of my mind maps below:
   
4. A change in routine – attending a workshop or talk, going to see a poster display, just mixing up my computer work with talking to people and getting fresh ideas. One thing that is really great about working in Ko Awatea is that we have many professional development opportunities or can sit in on workshops or seminars (like the design thinking workshop I attended the other week).
5. Deadlines or being under pressure. Much like Katie noted, I am motivated by deadlines – I love starting new projects and rotating between things, but I’m not always the best (or motivated at) following through on things, so deadlines help me focus and be productive and complete things.
6. Interacting with people – I really enjoy one-on-one tutorials or helping folk, and being able to interact with their problem/challenge and help solve it together. Helping other people does make me feel good, and I enjoy the challenge of working on something together and both learning more out of it. Often I have an ah-ha moment as I understand something about the topic together, or I have to figure out how to answer a question that I might not have thought about before.
7. Sharing things & reading things on Twitter. Just having a wee break in my day to see what’s happening on Twitter, to exchange a thought or interesting article, and be inspired by what other people are thinking about and working on.
8. Taking a short walk – I have been trying to build more exercise into my routine this year (particularly as my position is rather sedentary). I find taking a brief walk outside in the fresh air really helps to reenergize me (as sitting down for hours tends to make me feel a little sluggish).
9. Music. As Katie said, often she’ll have a concert party in her car on the way to work. I find listening to music can help me focus on getting routine tasks done, and can sometimes calm down the ‘imposter thoughts’ that others have mentioned – “Am I really doing this right? Is this the best possible work I could be doing?”
10. Talking with colleagues about ideas – often we’ll come up with some interesting ideas/problems/challenges at our weekly staff meetings which can help start some interesting ideas & collaborations.

So that’s what energizes me at work! What energizes you at work?

Tweeting on the fly – how I take notes & tweet

Design thinking workshop – notes & live-tweeting

Got a workshop on #designthinking soon – #excited! #Koawatea https://t.co/cRx8mzydT1 pic.twitter.com/0cx0OkVrmU

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 8, 2016

So I recently attended a one hour workshop on Design Thinking at my workplace, facilitated by Simon Holbrook, Innovation Director at Chrysalis Innovation Studio. It was a brilliant session and full of fantastic learning. I’ve dabbled in design thinking before, and love Austin Kleon’s work, which definitely has elements on this thinking. I arrived equipped with my pen, my trusty work diary (as I’ve finished off my free notebook), and my phone (a Samsung S5) to capture my thinking of the day.

The first part of the talk was going through the principles & theories of design thinking, and then Simon talked us through three case studies of big companies to show these principles in action. During the first part of the talk, I mainly scribbled notes in my book (see photo below). These are a bit messy and scrawly – I do love the idea of sketchnotes, and would like to experiment with more colour and typography, but this is the best I could do with a black pen and lined paper 🙂 I’m also a massive fan of @kimtairi’s sketchnotes from conferences and events (and just of her art in general – so creative!).

My scribbled notes in my work diary – stage 1

So this is stage one – some short bullet points, and some wee graphs and images (mainly drawn off the slides as they were quite simple models and easy to copy). From this point, while Simon went through the case studies, I listened with one ear and I started my tweets from the beginning of his talk.

I used some of the key words/quotes from Simon, and also quickly searched those keywords on Google images as well to find graphs/images to accompany my tweets. I could have taken the pictures of some slides, but I found the projector and the room we were in was a little dark, so they didn’t show up so well. When I found an image I wanted, I downloaded it onto my device, and then inserted it as a picture into my tweet.

*as a side note, tweets with pictures/photos average a 35% boost in retweets – and they look pretty and take up a bit more real estate on a Twitter feed, so get noticed more. Even if your picture is a quote on a pretty background (sneaky way to get more word count into your tweet AND include a picture), that helps too. Check out Pablo by Buffer, to get images that are free to use (and quotes that are free to use), in a handy social media size for sharing.*

So here are my series of the tweets from the talk – sent out while Simon was going through the case studies, so I was listening to the application & tweeting out the key messages from what he said earlier.

The hashtags #designthinking seemed to tap into tweets on a relevant topic, and I used the #KoAwatea hashtag for my work, to help index tweets on programmes that take place there.

What people say and do is never the same as they think & feel #empathymap #designthinking #koawatea pic.twitter.com/qPhjmod4UX

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

You need the add desirability lens – start with people & problems #designthinking #koawatea https://t.co/yZ9PiqtbRy pic.twitter.com/BWwUOfV3Rd

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

Fail fast – it's cheaper and you move on quicker – it's ok to fail over a weekend #designthinking #koawatea pic.twitter.com/ErkN7Jhwac

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

Love @austinkleon work #designthinking #steal #koawatea #blogjune https://t.co/ytUSh3OFFj

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

Included a sneaky link to my own blog post on Austin Kleon and design thinking, as I felt it was relevant to the conversation.

Challenges of #designthinking – the organization has a strong muscle memory versus agile thinking #koawatea pic.twitter.com/xuh5YwOQdR

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

The one picture of the slide I took – just loved the image and couldn’t find something similar online to share. It was a little bit fuzzy though…

Don't get too attached to your projects – move quickly & don't stagnate #designthinking #koawatea pic.twitter.com/59gmv9GY8F

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

Relish #ambuguity the world is changing #koawatea #designthinking pic.twitter.com/z0Stl0J79S

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

Simon said to relish ambiguity and I found this cool graphic on Google images so I included that – it made me laugh 🙂 

So what are you waiting for? Get creative! #koawatea #designthinking pic.twitter.com/gtlkx6EKtc

— Abigail Tarbotton (@ajtarbotton) June 9, 2016

My own call to action at the end as a way of wrapping up my tweets. 

Overall, I’m a big fan of live-tweeting and taking short bullet-point notes at conferences. Some people have asked me how I manage to keep up or I worry about missing points. As a learner, I’m definitely not auditory focused – if I’m just listening, I struggle to retain it, but if I take notes, or draw while I listen (or tweet), I retain a lot more of what I hear. So this method works for me as a way of capturing my learning, and hopefully producing useful tweets that summarize the main points or link to more information for other participants, and share some of what I am doing at work – just like Working Out Loud, which I just discovered this week. But more on that in another post!

So how do you take notes? Do you live-tweet and are those your notes? Or do you do a mixture and take notes and then tweet them? I’d love to hear your thoughts 🙂

Playing with my image – Bitmoji

So, inspired by a post by Karen Miller, aka @infoliterai, I created an avatar of myself using Bitmoji  – which may look just a little bit like me 🙂 I love the creativity in creating the cartoons, and would love to try my own bitstips. However, I’m feeling a bit technologically inept tonight – I can find the page & the app on Facebook, but it looks as though the Bitstrips app on Facebook is no longer active, but I can use the avatar I created in Bitmoji in other cartoons. Any ideas on other apps or places to use this?

One small step for man…

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind…

That’s a little bit the way I felt as I participated in a health conference – the first ever non-librarian conference I had been to. It felt like a whole new world, and a new place to explore. I’ll try to capture just a few of my thoughts and impressions from attending this conference, and the wealth of knowledge that I learned.

My current position is Information Specialist (Liaison Librarian if you like) with a special focus on Allied Health & Projects. A large part of my work is getting to understand the many different occupations and specialties that are included in Allied Health and help support their research and best practice. This involves doing literature searches to support projects or work initiatives, teaching information tutorials and one-on-one research tutorials, and attending Allied Health events where possible. Just to give you a bit of an idea, a really simple explanation of Allied Health is anyone working in health that isn’t a doctor or a nurse. Some of the many occupations that fit under the umbrella of Allied Health are:

• audiology
• dietitians
• occupational therapy
• physiotherapy
• psychology
• speech and language therapy
• social work

I had a poster accepted that talked about how my role was created (probably about a year before I came on board) to specifically liaise with Allied Health & Projects to help support research and evidence-based practice in these areas. I’ve included it below, in case you are interested to see it:

Anyway, my overall impressions from the conference (and from some of the themes that were raised) is that many of the same challenges that face Allied Health face librarians as well. The first keynote by Professor Sharon Mickan focused on the importance of using evidence-based research to support our practice, and she also mentioned what a useful resource health librarians are in both locating resources, creating search strategies, and also co-authoring the research along with the relevant health professionals. The other two keynotes, by Professor Susan Nancarrow, and Dr Graeme Benny, picked up the key themes of education, and how many people are going through long years of training, and then the difficulty of getting jobs that are appropriate to their specializations. They also picked up on the importance of being generalists as well, but still utilizing our areas of expertise and providing that guidance and expert knowledge in multidisciplinary teams. Many of these themes would be equally applicable to librarians, I believe – particularly being generalists, learning new skills, but also making the most of the traditional librarian skills & knowledge as we also work in multidisciplinary teams, and get outside of the library and embedded into wider work teams.

One of the other themes – which I know a lot of other librarians can say Amen to! – is that we are not getting more resources, but we need to keep offering and often extending our service. So the little mantra is “Instead of getting more resources, we need to be more resourceful” – for librarians, what can we do with what we have already to work smarter, to help more people, to allow better & equitable access to resources and knowledge?

Many of the presentations were also inspiring, with many great examples of working together, working smarter with the resources we have, and keeping it focused on the customer/user/patient/person – what do they need and is the service we are providing enough for them?

It was encouraging being able to interact with a lot of different people from different disciplines and perspectives, and to learn more about what they do, and how they are doing it differently in response to changing needs.

While there wasn’t an offical hashtag, one of the participants suggested that we all use #nzahconf16 to index our tweets. Many of the conference participants weren’t on Twitter, so it was really exciting to see some of them pick it up for the first time, or dust off their old accounts, and join the conversation. You can also read a storify of the tweets that I collated from the two day conference.

Overall, I had a blast at conference – thank you very much to my workplace for the support to go and present a poster, and network with Allied Health professionals from around the country. It’s definitely helped me understand some of the key challenges facing Allied Health practitioners in their practice, and hopefully it will help me continue to grow my knowledge of each of these areas so I can support them better in my on-going work.

 So back to you now:

• Have you been to a conference other than a library conference?
• What were your impressions?
• How do you think attending professional development events that are not focused on librarians will help you develop into a better information professional?

Learning to see like your heroes #BlogJune

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love @AustinKleon’s writing, and this is one of my favourite quotes from his book “Steal like an artist: 10 things no one ever told you about creativity.” The main point of this quote is that it’s fine to begin with imitating our favourite heroes, artists, mentors, but it needs to move beyond that. We need to not be content with imitating them (looking like them); we need to see things the way that they saw them and produce art like they might have (but with out own particular spin on it).

I suppose this also extends to professional practice; I’m sure we all have people that we look up to, or who we think about doing this whole librarian-thing really well. But we can’t be exactly like someone else; we have to put our own spin on it. But we can definitely learn from others before us, and the more influences we have – the better our own work will be!

So (at the risk of sounding like Buzzfeed) – you do you 🙂