For our Spotlight on Staff series, fourteen-year-old Shreyas puts some questions to Cambridge Children's Hospital Project Director Malcolm McFrederick. They talk about the challenges faced on such a big project, food in hospital and the need for patience! You can watch the video or read the transcription, below.
Shreyas puts our Project Director Malcolm McFrederick in the spotlight
Link: https://youtu.be/geUjEQwgnao
What you do and what you love about your job?
I'm the Project Director. What's exciting about Cambridge Children's Hospital is it's the first project of its type in the country where we're looking at the the whole child, the whole family, and pulling together everybody's needs, whether it be physical health or mental health. This is genuinely really exciting for me. I've had experience of being in hospital, both myself and as a father. I think one of the things that is really important to me, from my experience, is the fact that everyone at Cambridge Children's Hospital will have their own room and, where necessary, parents will be able to stay with the children. That would have helped me on many, many occasions.
There are certain challenges in working with so many different organisations and people, as well as people who are going to be involved - children and parents and doctors and nurses. How do you manage to have the time and the scope to pull all that wisdom together in one place so we get the the best hospital at the end of it. If you think about the number of people who are involved and the range of people who are involved, that's actually a real challenge. There's going to be a school, too, so we've got to make sure the teachers are involved.
The other thing is because nobody's done it before, then people who are looking at it, whether they be in government or elsewhere in the NHS, say 'Ah, explain that to me, I haven't seen one of those' and so they question you more about what you're doing. That takes time and it takes patience as well. You have this combination of needing to get lots of people involved to get the best hospital at the end and, because it's new, explaining to everybody what you're doing, which is really exciting every time you do it but it takes a lot of time.
What do you think about hospital food? I hear there's some things you really don't like!
I do not like jelly! What I don't like, and when I've been in hospital with my children, is that at each meal sometimes you get those pots of plastic orange jelly with foil on as the only pudding. I cannot think of anything worse! So, one thing that we need to do for our food at Cambridge Children's Hospital is to have a wider range of things, other than plastic orange jelly for puddings - or raw tomatoes!
I think it's an area we're going to have to do some work, listen to what children actually want, what their parents want as well, so we get a good range of satisfying food to eat, because there's nothing worse in hospital than just eating rubbish.
Finally, what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Never agree to do interviews! I think that was the best piece of advice I've ever been given, but apart from that, on a more serious note, it is to be patient. I think as Project Director, pulling everything together takes time, takes a lot of people, and it takes a lot of patience, so I have to learn to be patient.