Medicine, comms, waste and value!

Today was our departmental meeting - didn't start well as the coffee didn't arrive in time, and at 9.30am that's important! However, things soon got a lot better, and we had a great presentation from our PVC for Medicine, Dentistry and Health on the challenges facing a faculty so closely interlinked with the NHS. We also heard a lot about their strengths - in particular ScHARR - our centre for health related research which does much of the research into public health that you'll see reported in the national media. A very good overview of one of our most complex faculties.

We also had a presentation from our comms manager about how to find out what's happening in CiCS. We have our own  Google site - Just for CiCS where we gather together everything that people should need to know. The news is collected in two main sections - About Work and About People - as we include social news as well as work related. 

The news can be updated within minutes of a member of the comms team hearing about something, and we have a comms flow which includes automated tweets and facebook updates:

So, news is spread round the department first via J4C, then if it is relevant to the rest of the University to our news blog, and then if it's relevant to students, to our Facebook page. Finally, every month we send an email newsletter out to all staff and students which is a digest of the most relevant news for them.
I'm sure we don't get it right in all cases, but we'd be interested to have feedback and any suggestions for improvements.

Finally we had an overview from the Process Improvement Unit of two things that are very important to them and to all of us - Waste, which we need to get rid of, and Value, which we need to add!