Julian is a specialty registrar in respiratory medicine who has taken a year out of training as an out-of-programme experience to work with the Improvement Academy.

Since joining the team in August 2015, he has been working on a range of quality improvement and patient safety projects, including improving patient flow, urgent care triage, air quality, scaling up safety huddles, and data linkage.

Julian shared some reflections after his year working with the Improvement Academy as a Clinical Leadership Fellow:

As a Leadership Fellow I coordinated the proposal for Connected Yorkshire, which successfully secured £4 million of funding to deliver a regional data linkage and analytics platform. This has given me the opportunity to work with a wide range of stakeholders, ranging from senior leaders from acute trusts, CCGs, universities, local authority and public health.

I collaborated with our stakeholders on writing a robust proposal that covered all aspects of a large scale data linkage project including infrastructure, management and governance, budget, data sharing and consent issues. As a result of this I have gained valuable experience which will be of benefit when I return to clinical practice: I have learnt how to apply my leadership skills to work with people from different organisations across the NHS, and I have gained valuable insight in the current issues around health informatics.