This week we spoke to Delphine Garr, our Head of Education Projects and Programmes. She joined us in September 2020 after a varied career and is part of a team that’s responsible for providing our staff with continuous professional development to enhance their skills.

Lives: in Barnet with her husband Edmund, a specialist biomedical scientist at UCLH, and their 22-year-old son Stephen, an investor relations analyst.

And: Delphine talks to her plants, as she believes it makes them more beautiful!

Tell us about your career so far

My first job was about working with healthcare practitioners including pharmacists, doctors, nurses and lab technicians to improve integrated working and enhance patient care. In reality I have come full circle since doing that job.

My background is in education, advisory work, mass communication, project management and HR - especially organisational development (OD) and learning and development. I have worked with the Citizens Advice Bureau as adviser and also with Community Service Volunteers (CSV) as Office and Development Manager. Next I worked at the Department of Health as Policy Manager for Section 64 General Scheme of grants and implemented a number of innovative health and social care projects. It was interesting and I enjoyed being able to improve processes to save time and money. I also worked in Barnet Council as Workforce Development and Learning Manager and subsequently worked for Tower Hamlets Council as the Leadership Development Manager.

My career in the NHS began when I started working with Hertfordshire and West Essex Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG), as Head of Organisational Development and Learning where I worked across five CCGs and combined my project management skills with my OD skills to effectively deliver change and improve learning and development. It was quite interesting to see how implementing an electronic appraisal system via ESR (Electronic Staff Record) improved completion rates and became valued by all staff; even mandatory training was no longer a taboo!

You joined our Trust in September - how have you found settling in?

It has been quite easy. Everyone has been so welcoming (thank you all for that), and supportive. We’re lucky to be working with a fantastic group of people here and I am highly indebted.

I’ve got a very good balance combining project work with education programmes. I’m working with my team and stakeholders to ensure we deliver education programmes effectively, seamlessly, and effortlessly.

I’m very passionate about the work that we do and I love change. I can see there’s a lot of it going on here. I am really energised about change which is one of the reasons I took on this role. I’m driven by achievement and I love to be in an environment where we can make a difference. For me, change and transformation comes with a great opportunity to innovate, to enhance our practice or to ditch some of the bureaucracy that we do not need. Change is always very energising, I get excited about it so this is the right job for me.

I’ve enjoyed it so far and met some great and very inspiring people. Everyone I meet is very supportive and I’m quite excited about what we’re planning to do.

What are you planning to do?

We’re looking to create a world-class development programme for our workforce which is timely, especially if you consider what has happened with Covid-19. Our plans include using online platforms to support that process.

We’ve just launched Clinicalskills.net at our Trust, which is an online resource for our entire workforce. This has been the first project that I’ve led with colleagues in my team and I’m very proud that we’ve managed to deliver this for the workforce. We are now preparing for the launch event on Wednesday 24 March from 10.30am to 12noon to promote the full benefits of the resource and how it can support revalidation and continuous professional development.

What are your hobbies and interests?

I love cooking, which means I get to eat a lot! I also love watching films, which is something I’ve done a lot more of during lockdown. I also like reading and I find gardening therapeutic. I love being able to go outside into my garden and talk to my plants. It’s a bit absurd but my godmother is a florist and she told me that if you talk to your plants, it makes them more beautiful and frankly my plants look good!

And now we have a roadmap out of lockdown, what are you most looking forward to?

I’m a party animal - if I had the opportunity, I’d celebrate every milestone. It would be great if my husband and I could celebrate our silver anniversary this year. I don’t think we’ll be able to have a party but it will be nice to go out for a meal as a family. That will be on my son, he has promised us he will pay for it!