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Quarterly Update from the PSI Chair - Q3 2020

Oct 8, 2020, 16:04 PM

Welcome to the third chairs blog of 2020! I’d like to firstly thank Nigel Howitt for handling things during May-July while I was out on maternity leave. 

This year is going a little differently than we had planned and last month we took the difficult decision to postpone the PSI Conference in 2021, which was to be held in Gothenburg to 2022. We are still working on what alternative events we will hold in its place and we will communicate this with you ASAP, the full announcement is available on the PSI website.

As usual, I have structured the blog to showcase one area we are working on towards our strategic objectives. The Board of Directors has another strategy day coming up in October where we will assess how we are doing against our business plan, as well as looking at areas we may need to change to adapt to the ongoing uncertainty in the external environment.

Empower members in their profession by strengthening and broadening their technical and influencing skills 
A digitisation group is coming together with members from across many of our committees to look at our digital strategy for 2021 onwards to ensure we can maintain providing high quality events, even when no or limited face to face interactions can be held. We will provide further updates on this after our strategy day. 

Nurture and expand a collaborative and engaged community 
We hit 3000 members in our LinkedIN Community! ☺

Promote the value of career opportunities related to the use of statistics in healthcare 
We are working hard with the leadership of Naomi Givens to provide a range of offerings for members to support you throughout your career, with a focus on developing individuals as they move into more senior leadership positions (manager or non-manager roles).  You will start to see activities around this in 2021.

Advance healthcare by being a leading partner in the application of statistics
I’m pleased to share that Mary Elliott-Davey has been working closely with Richard Kay to promote his Statistics for Non-Statisticians course. We have often discussed on the board about how to ensure we are improving the statistical knowledge of the healthcare community as a whole. If you know anyone who is interested, they can receive a discount by going via the PSI page here.  

Stay safe, look after each other and keep smiling ☺

Book recommendation

AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (Buddy enjoyed reading this one in the sun during lockdown)

Guiyuan Lei at Roche recommended this book and having spent a number of months working on our personalised health care strategy for Roche in China, I wish I had started to read this sooner. If you are interested in the history and future or AI in China and the US this is a great starter.

A couple of key take-homes for me were we are moving out of an era where methodology giants are winning and moving into an era where scale up an applications of AI is going to be the dominant force. Here China is likely to have the advantage given the government priorities for AI in the region. Whereas the US was dominant during the build-up and methodology stage. 

We all need to be prepared for what the workforce will look like in an AI dominant world and is something governments need to get ahead of the curve on to ensure we have strategies in place to support this future world – some ideas are proposed, but more are being debated as we speak. We need to make sure we help to prepare ourselves, families, friends, colleagues and organisations for an AI dominant world, which may not be that far away…………….

buddy 

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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