Name: Jasmine Plowright
Role: Communications Consultant
Started working with the NHS: April 2020
What was your first job in the NHS?
Depends whether you count being paid in choc ices by my Mum’s colleagues during the school holidays. If so, I’ve had a variety of NHS roles dating back to 1990! Officially, I started working with Alliance for Better Care (ABC) as an independent consultant in April 2020.
What led you to work with the NHS?
My introduction to the NHS starts with my Mum. She became a nurse at 18 and, after having me, went on to a varied career in healthcare. Among her many roles, she established a department of 40 bilingual health advocates at City & Hackney Community Care Trust, helping refugees and asylum seekers navigate and access healthcare through guidance, support and interpreting services.
I spent much of my childhood in primary care settings. I would do my homework with the health visitors while waiting for Mum to finish work, get paid in sweets and treats to weigh babies (and occasionally get wee’d on!) in the health clinic, and spend my school holidays filing patient records in alphabetical order. This was back when records were kept in pink wallets, stuffed with printed pages and squeezed into overflowing filing cabinets.
I then somehow managed to stay away from working in the NHS for the next 20-plus years, until Covid.
As Katherine was coming to terms with what lockdown might look like, she asked me to support ABC as a consultant, helping put the infrastructure in place to move the organisation online. This included introducing Microsoft Teams, establishing remote working arrangements and moving training online.
What started as a relatively small consultancy assignment quickly grew to include operational and communications support for the Covid-19 vaccination programme. Since then, I’ve continued to support ABC as a consultant, helping to establish and develop its communications function which has now grown to include a central team of two full-time employees.
Do you have a funny story to share?
I was primary school age, and it was just another school holiday. The choice was either to go to work with Mum or go to the Play Centre.
I was doing my usual rounds at John Scott Health Centre in North London, helping to book patients into chiropody and dental appointments, weighing babies in the health clinic, handing out bottles of banana-flavoured vitamin drops and nappies, and then heading over to family planning to help put together their ‘goody bags’.
These brown paper bags had to be filled with colourful little squares and small round tablets that needed to be slotted into packets before being handed out.
On this particular day, the team had ‘gone out to bring people in’, and lots of women started arriving.
The colourful squares were a mystery to me, but I’d somehow convinced myself that the tablets helped women have babies. So, naturally, I cheerfully said “congratulations” every time I handed someone a bag.
It wasn’t until years later that my Mum explained these were outreach sessions for sex workers, and I’d actually been handing out condoms and contraceptive pills!
What has been your greatest NHS achievement?
It has to be my small contribution to the success Covid-19 vaccination rollout across Surrey and Sussex.
It was an incredibly difficult time for everyone, and the challenge was enormous. There was no playbook to follow, but we were among the first to go live in the South East, the first in the country to take vaccinations into the community on a bus, and the first in the South East to run a 24-hour booster clinic.
We saw people come out of retirement to work alongside us, furloughed workers volunteering their time to support their local communities, and community leaders opening their doors to help us reach people who might otherwise have struggled to access the vaccine.
It was an extraordinary collective effort, bringing together people from all walks of life with a shared determination to make a difference.
Knowing that we played a part in protecting our communities, particularly as my family and I live in the same community we serve, makes it even more special.
I’ll always be incredibly proud to have played a small part in it.
What would you like to see for the future of our local NHS services?
During the pandemic, so many people who had been furloughed chose to volunteer or work in the NHS for the first time, often thinking it would only be temporary. They brought with them an incredible range of skills, experiences and fresh perspectives that proved enormously valuable.
I hope we continue to recognise the value of people from different backgrounds and career paths, and that more people see the NHS as an exciting and rewarding career choice, whatever their experience.
The NHS needs to continue to attract a vibrant, diverse workforce, bringing together different skills, experiences, ideas and perspectives to ensure this extraordinary national institution continues to thrive for generations to come.
