Margo Smith – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

IT & Digital

Individual or Team Nomination?

Individual

Qualifying Qualities

In these challenging times, nominators were asked to show how the nominee had demonstrated the following qualities:

Exceptional work ethic - going above and beyond their job description, especially in the past 12 months.
Outstanding achievement/s in work or outside of the organisation where relevant.
Drive for innovation and proactive leadership in these challenging times.
High level of interpersonal skills, such as kindness, empathy, loyalty and thoughtfulness to staff and patients.
A resilience considering Covid to their role and to the health and wellbeing of their colleagues.

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

I have been involved with Health Informatics and Digital health for almost 20 years and have known Margo Smith for the majority of that time. We are part of Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation trust as well as being a shared commercial informatics service digitally supporting many different NHS organisations including Acute Trusts, CCGs/ICS, Mental Health, Community, Social Care and 3rd Sector, even Prisons, and that is where Margo comes to the fore – “There isn’t much happening digitally across our Region/Place/Trust that has not crossed Margo’s desk to some extent, at some point” Her primary role is heading up all the digital support functions for the trusts and 3rd sector orgs however her impact is felt much wider than that as she has become the ‘go to’ person that pulls all the services together. The reason she is our unsung hero is that she does this with such integrity, commitment and drive whilst still being humble and somewhat unaware of the huge contribution she is making to patient care across West Yorkshire. Her approach is very much about getting the job done, always finding a way to overcome any perceived barriers. She is generally one step ahead pre-empting requirements based on her experience or proactively addressing issues she has identified along the way, again with little fuss or fan fair, always in the background but absolutely one of the key driving forces behind all that we do around digital services. If anything digital needs progressing or if people aren’t sure who to go to for an answer/action then they very often ‘ask Margo’ and this includes Digital Leaders, Clinicians, Divisional Managers, Technicians & Project Managers both internally and across the different Health and Social Care organisations within the Region/Place. Recent examples include ensuring all the vaccination centres were technically enabled at a rapid pace across GPs, Community Centres, Stadiums and within the hospital throughout December/January 2020/21 and specifically over the Christmas period. She was instrumental in working with our CNIO to set up a relatives line and virtual visiting process to enable patients to see their family and friends through the extremely difficult early covid period. Margo worked with patient engagement to support a process around ‘letter to a loved one’ for families to communicate with patients whilst there was no visiting. Played a key role in digitally enabling over 2000 staff to ‘Work from Home’ in less than 2 weeks as the country went into lockdown. And she did all this alongside her role in ensuring that the support was there for digitally mature and reliant organisations could continue to deliver compassionate care to their patients. Margo does not seek the limelight or intentionally self-promote, she would always play down the contribution or impact of her work when the reality is much the opposite. Margo continues, as she always has, to be hardworking, dedicated and outcome driven whilst still being compassionate, people focussed and supportive to all no matter of their role, position or request – A true Unsung Hero!