Interview with Dione Rogers, RN

Intro:

You’re listening to the Designing for Health podcast series, where we explore health care and technology with experts from around the globe.

Hello and welcome to the the Designing for Health podcast. I’m Nordic’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Craig Joseph.

What happens when a bedside nurse with a dyslexic pattern-recognition brain decides the answer to a broken hospital workflow isn’t a new policy it’s a picnic? My guest today is Dione Rodgers, a Chief Nursing Informatics Officer who spent decades in England’s NHS turning around failing wards, not with top-down mandates, but with data, curiosity, and a willingness to look ridiculous in a parking structure surrounded by color-coded paper.

We talk about why digitizing a broken process doesn’t fix it, it amplifies it. We talk about the VOD model: visualize, optimize, then digitize. And we talk about what it takes to get clinical staff not just tolerating a digital transformation but running toward it.

If you lead a health system and you’re about to implement something big, this conversation is worth your time. Plus … tea!

Let’s plug in.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Dione Rogers, welcome to the pod. How are you doing today?

Dione Rogers:

I’m very well, thank you. Craig. How are you?

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

I am doing well. Where do we find you? Where are you hanging out today?

Dione Rogers:

So I am in my book nook, which is my little reading nook in my garden, which is in northeast, England. In a little town. Well, it’s a big county, actually, called Lincolnshire. And I’m right on the coast. So, yeah, in my garden, in my little reading nook. At the moment, I love to read.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

And I have to say, like, I did not know that you were British. I can’t even hear the accent. No, that’s a lie. I didn’t know that you were British, and I. So thank you for getting out of the pod. It’s. It’s much earlier. I’m sorry. Much later for you than it is for me. I guess that’s how time zones work.

So I certainly appreciate it. We met at a at a conference, and I thought your history and in your work was, was super interesting and wanted to share it on the podcast. So can you give us a little bit of history. You know what you how you started and how you ended up where you are now?

Dione Rogers:

Yeah, sure. Thank you. So I’m going to take you back to when I was 13 and arguing with my father sort of every weekend around what my career path might look like. My dad was from a very working class background, a car mechanic. But I had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit and kept saying to me, you need to go into computers.

That’s your thing, not your thing. And I was like, no, no, no, I want to be enough. I don’t want to sit behind a screen. This was in the 80s. So screens were like, you know, just emerging really. And we had endless rounds. So ironically, you know, fast forward 30 years and I ended up as a chief nursing informatics officer.

So actually, we were both right and we were both wrong. But he passed 20 years ago. So it’s kind of a nice thing for me to remember, like how it all started and that he saw that in me, from a very early stage. But so I started, nursing when I was 18. Just really want, you know, caring, wanted to kind of do the right thing, be a good citizen, and actually loved it.

It was a real privilege. I still am a registered nurse. So that was 33 years ago. I got my qualification, but over the years really found a great passion in improvement work. I found myself becoming really frustrated with inefficiency and actually the effect on staff and patients of that. So not the inefficiency per say, just the fact it was happening on those working around me, working with me and myself, you know, a busy working mum.

It was hard. It was hard. There was a lot of inefficiencies. I found myself in sort of getting picked for improvement stuff and ended up doing a project around patient flow. Actually, that’s where it all started around patients like in the, around 2011, which was looking at how we use data in a chain of tasks around how a patient comes into hospital.

This is an acute hospital and how they move through the system. And actually the bits of improvement. One about the day of discharge, where a lot of the improvement project, it was about reducing the waste in the system and finding out actually where the kind of true constraint was. And it blew my mind. It blew my mind at how inefficient the pathways were.

And actually we were just working on the wrong thing. And so that really piqued my interest in the use of data. But the use of data for frontline staff, not just for reports or root cause analysis of where things went wrong, actually in the moment, how can we use data to better manage our patients? Because I was seeing a lot of patients deteriorating whilst in hospital because of being in hospital when they didn’t need to be there.

And that really spoke to me and I couldn’t shake it for a number of years. So I ended up, becoming a chief nursing informatics officer about 7 or 8 years ago and haven’t looked back.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Well. So I want to focus on something you said earlier and something that you just added. So you said that your dad kind of saw in you that you were a computer friendly kind of person, and that technology might have been your thing even before you saw it. And then you would just mentioned that you were a nurse, being a nurse and doing nursing things, and then someone assigned you, someone assigned you.

So does it was that like just an accident, or was there another person who kind of saw that you were going to be able to take your clinical and operational skills and add them together with some, some analysis to actually move the move the needle, the needle.

Dione Rogers:

Yeah, I think you’re spot on. I think it’s not that I wasn’t self-aware about my analytical brain until a few years ago, actually, and it’s always been other people spotting that in me. I, I became after that project. Sorry. Before that project I was a ward manager and I could see very clearly inefficiencies in how the ward was operating.

It was a ward that was really failing and through the use of data, really, I turned the ward around within 12 months and actually won a leadership award. The chief executive invited me to his office and I thought, you know, what have I done wrong? And he was like, I don’t know what you’re doing, but like, I used to just get complaints about this ward and now I’m getting so many compliments.

And it was, it was that that really. Then people started to spot that I could use data to really make improvements and pretty quickly, actually. And quite simple stuff. No big projects. Really simple things. Like my staff were leaving about a year into a role. They were leaving. And so there was an incredibly bad reputation for that unit.

So I started to look at the reasons why they were leaving and actually they were being promoted. And so the story became very different around that. And we use that then to recognize that actually it was an area that gave the other nurses a lot of support, a fast track training program, which meant that they could proceed quicker than another unit.

And that then became a way that we could actually bring people in. And within six months, we were over recruited and loaning staff out to other areas. So I think that kind of initiative and my analytical thinking later, it came out that I do have dyslexia and so then it kind of made sense why I could think in these very different patterns, really. And that’s what people saw, that I actually didn’t say I do now, but it took a long time. Right?

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Yeah, that’s I think what do they say? It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle sometimes. And so you need someone who’s kind of outside looking in. Well, so let’s dig down into some of those specifics. From the beginning. You said that, you know, you had seen a ton of inefficiencies in some of the wards that you were on.

And, and, I love that story about how it seemed like this must have been a horrible, a horrible ward because everyone was leaving. And then it turned out, well, they were all quite good, and they were being promoted to go through the rest of the hospital or the system. So sometimes things are not as they appear just with the data alone.

So what were some of those inefficiencies and how did you kind of get things turned around in a year? So Dion, you had mentioned earlier that when you kind of started in one of the wards, you saw a lot of inefficiencies and problems that others necessarily maybe didn’t see, and you were able to correct many of them in a short amount of time, like a year. And so what were some of those, some of those problems and how to fix them?

Dione Rogers:

So I started to look up again what the data was telling me. So one of the biggest complaint was around patients having lack of nutrition. So I observed what was going on and it was falling to pretty much, you might call them Naci. We call them healthcare assistant on the ward and it so when the when the lunchtime trolleys came around and the teatime trolleys come around, these were really busy periods.

These there were three staff on duty on an average shift and they were trying to feed 30 patients, get the meals out, warm, sick patients up. This was the same time as nurses were doing medication. We had visiting and it was chaos and staff were doing their best. So I thought, how, how can we do this?

So rather than being dictatorial, I took one person from each group, each profession. And we took them out for the day and we looked at what was going on really, and said, how can we make this better? Our patients need to be fed. We’ve got a wicked problem here. It’s all happening at the same time. Kind of what do we do?

We solve the problem together. Really. And so what we decided was unless there was a catastrophic event going on, nobody on the unit was exempt from helping people have their food and drink at mealtimes. And so we called it flooding the ward. So just prior to the meals coming out, we would all go, including myself, if I was in meetings or office work, we would all go out and we would help set patients up, make sure they were positioned to eat.

The tables were clear and we all then went and dished out the meals, which took five ten minutes, and it meant then we could all go back to our duties. Nothing particularly was disrupted and actually we stopped getting complaints from people. You know, it was such a great thing and it was testing time. And then and then our, our image, our reputation started to improve because actually then when our senior staff were out on the wards doing this as well, it just gave a different image.

It uplifted the staff going, it’s not just on us and we just keep getting berated because the complaints are coming out like it’s just much more of a team effort. So I’m not sure where that thinking came from. It just made sense to me that that was the right thing to do. And so then we took that in lots of other ways.

How did we how did we present ourselves in uniform? How do we present ourselves on the telephone? How do we answer the telephone? How do we welcome patients onto the ward? How did we make sure their property was looked after? So we started this cycle of improvement, but really as a collaborative. And I think that’s just my style.

And then I use data again, you know, thinking about how we measured things. A person somebody told me once, showing me how you measure me, I’ll show you how I behave. And that meant a great deal to me. So I then was really careful how I measured things and what the impact was, because if people were doing their best, then it was up to me as a leader to find a way to do it differently.

Using some of the data and using some of the metrics. And that’s one of the reasons I, I really looked to our audit program and said is the starting value. And I think that’s something that’s become really part of who I am, is does the shock value and what impact does it happen? I think my skills at looking at that and bringing people on board have really helped. A lot of the improvement went down.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

So some of it is just kind of I, I hate to use the phrase, because it’s kind of cliche, but thinking outside the box, right. Like, well, we, you know, sure, it’s a busy time when we’re handing out, meals and but what could we do? We only have four people that could do that. And your answer was not a high tech one.

Everyone who’s available can hand out meals no matter what their, their rank or tenure is. And it’s kind of, you know, something that you often hear is that’s not my job. Yeah. And so how did you did you hear that? I’m assuming you heard it from someone. And then how do you respond to. That’s not my job.

Dione Rogers:

So I always put it back to them personally. And this was the hospital that cared for their family. Take, how would they feel if their family member came in and hadn’t had basic needs? Eating and drinking, being warm, being clean or basic human right. So shouldn’t we be getting that right? And actually, the question that I ask them to reflect on is, what do you want people to think of you when you say you work on this unit?

Do you want them to say it’s a unit that gets poor care regardless of how hard we were working? That was the message people said about that unit, and I didn’t see that in the people that were working there. I, I feel really good people. But the reputation was terrible. And I said, say, you know, if someone says, oh, you know, I work in this ward, what do you want them to think?

And actually, we’re measured by the basic we’re actually measured by that. So I want you to be thought of as a great person, a great person giving care because I don’t believe anyone goes into care without wanting to do their very best. So yeah, just to thank human and I think just talking to them and saying, you know, my family are treated here, I want them to know that they’re going to get the basics and we’re going to do our best.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And I certainly think many clinical folks who have never spent a day in the hospital as a patient or, have to engage with the system as a patient. It’s difficult sometimes to kind of see everything from the patient’s perspective, unless it’s you or a loved one, and kind of bringing that back once.

Once you have that experience, it does make you want to provide the best service that you can. Well, let’s talk about something that it was a two-word phrase that, that you mentioned when we were preparing for this, that I thought was awesome. And I think also kind of gives a good glimpse into how you how you practice, which is paper picnic.

Dione Rogers:

Yes.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

So I have to be honest, I’ve never attended a paper picnic, but, What was that? Why would I attend one? And, how effective was it? Or are they.

Dione Rogers:

Yeah, again, a little bit of an insight into how my brain works. I work very visually. So this goes back to around 2019, 2020. I just started in my CNI. I enrolled and we we were still on paper. We, the trust I was working at, which was Kettering General Hospital, right in the middle of England, and we were still on paper.

It was a trust I trained in, and I could I could really say that we’d got a problem. We were being asked to digitize this, to put this into a new electronic payment method. And again, going out onto the wards and looking at how the staff were working, I was seeing some real burnout problems, some real inefficiencies. And the moment came when we saw some reports that our full palms were going up and the immediate knee jerk from the nursing team was to redo the falls. Risk assessment and.

So I’m thinking, what? Why are we doing this? We’ve got a lot of data coming in. We’re not really utilizing it. It’s not really helping us to manage patients harm. So why would we think back to that again is the starting value? That’s the question I always I always ask. And the nursing team ended up putting more data fields in to the paper that we would then plan to digitize.

And I was like, I don’t think this is going to work. And, but I couldn’t find a way to help people to see the big picture. And so I thought, I’m going to show them the big picture. We’re going to have a look at this. So I was working with our EPR supplier A nationally and I, I Jacqueline and said, look, I’ve got vision that if we actually put all the paper out on the floor and then start to have a look at what this meant in different ways, we’re gonna be able to see what we need to do.

I genuinely believe that we will. So I said, it’s so almost like a big picnic blanket if we put it all out, I know there’s going to be hundreds of different pieces of different colored paper. Like, I think this is a picnic blanket. And it was in the middle of Covid when we started kind of this in the middle of the second wave.

And said, you know, we’re making all this paper around, what does this actually look like? And we need to do something about this before we digitize it, because it’s going to compound the problem. And so she managed to kind of work her magic to to realize what my brain was saying. And we started then to, to come up with the concept of paper picnic, which was hiring a big marquee, putting it right in the middle of the car park, inviting all the clinical staff to bring that piece of paper that they were using.

Swim lines. So one was assessment, one was care plans, one was referral documentation, the whole shebang that we had seven trim lines. And if you brought a piece of paper, that was we hadn’t collected yet, you got a little prize, you got a little matching device. And then around the edges we had our stuff from it. All right, training team, we had our team that were trying to recruit digital champions in and stand there.

And if you engage with that stand, you got a piece of picnic food or drink. So at the end we got some intelligence from you. You got to meet the team to be supporting the transformation, and you ended up with a nice picnic basket at the end, and you could go and sit with your friends for an hour and have some lunch and a chat.

And of course, the feedback form on a little QR code on the picnic back. So that was the start of the paper picnic. It’s actually, I think, about 20 trusts now in in England to have completed a paper picnic. It’s been revealed by the Chief nursing informatics officer of England, and that work then started to inform the digital documentation standards that we’re now seeing in the UK.

Because some really bold things came out like there was 72 pieces of data required for an admission, and on paper that meant 72 data, 72 times 72 signatures, 72 printed names before anybody started. And we worked out that if you actually completed all the data of an admission, it would take two hours. But we had about 15 minutes. The nurse had about 15 minutes. So we were completely setting our nurses up to fail.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Sure.

Dione Rogers:

And then if we were going to digitize that, how do we do that? How do we get as much data in to that initial assessment without and using the great efforts of technology to actually reduce this down? So classic examples, it date and time stamps and recognizes who you offer immediately. The 70 pieces of information were gone with digitization but then duplication.

How do we do that. We saw 12 forms different forms of AI behavioral cha, so 12 different variations. And then we were wondering why our social care colleagues and our mental health colleague, when we were discharging patients was confused with the data that we were sending out because we weren’t standardized. So we made some decisions around standardization before we digitized.

So this then became a model called board methodology. Visualize, optimize, digitize. And that is now used by system C, one of the English CPR clients. And we’ve written up around this in the National Times. And really, Jacqueline, I speak about this quite regularly to support people recognizing that rubbish is not rubbish out. Rubbish in is amplified when you digitize that. So that was kind of the vision of paper picnic really a little crazy idea in my head that’s been quite impactful.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Yeah. Well I, you know, I love you mentioned that that VOD model visualize optimize digitize and the visualize part is a is something that we often miss right when we go right to trying to at least digitize things. And your point is we’re making bad things much faster so you can do more of those bad or unnecessary things which I love that your stories reminded me of a story from, I don’t know, a long time ago, probably, almost two decades ago, but, it was a hospital that was moving from paper to an electronic health record, and it was I was called as I was working for the vendor at the

time, for the for the year vendor, and I was called down to, see if I could help with this problem. And the problem was that the blood bank was refusing to send blood up to the floors because they didn’t have a form that needed to be signed by the doctors. And for years they had this form signed by the doctors, and they couldn’t release the blood without that form.

And they were on one side of the room, the other side where the doctors who said, we’ve never seen this form, that was difficult. Right. And it clearly hadn’t been, it clearly hadn’t been digitized. And then ultimately after some, some investigation, it turned out that the unit clerk, the secretary, had been filling out the form and signing the form for, for years, for years.

And so clearly we had two sides that really didn’t know what was going on with an intermediary that was just trying to help the unit clerk. But clearly that form didn’t bring any value to anyone because it was just it was filled out by the unit secretary. And so, you know, without that kind of understanding about, hey, there are some workflows that don’t make any sense.

We do them, we don’t need to digitize them. So that kind of first visualized, which again, I love the idea of being in a car park somewhere with just paper all over. And I can just imagine the lanes of, you know, the workflow lanes, the swim lanes with just paper. And then, of course, I can also visualize people fighting over new pieces of paper that they can bring to the event.

No, don’t you know, I found it? I’m breaking it. No, I found it. I like that you’re really incentivizing people. Probably for what was just a few pounds. To get, you know, a t shirt or something.

Dione Rogers:

That’s right. The beauty of it, the I guess one of the unexpected outcomes was that we did have to point these things out. The inefficiencies, the what we need to do differently, people had to what they saw. And it was very different lenses. And they started to then form these, these special interest groups, these design groups that that we’re going to be going.

I thought, so I didn’t expect that, quite honestly. I expected, you know, to be there to be some realization. But it really energized people. And I, I read a book last month called The Power of Moments. Chip and Faith. And that’s what it was. It was the power of having a collective fun moment. Health is very, very serious and actually doing a bit of something out of the ordinary, a bit intriguing, a bit creative, but actually, then there was a real output, the survey that came out of it, we talked about what technology would be delightful for them.

And delightful, the word I absolutely love. And when you talk to technology, it’s not a widely used word, but actually it needs to be delightful to, to make it work. Adoption is a non-existent thing if it’s delightful. So. And the big thing that came out was, I would love to be able to talk my documentation on the system records and put it in.

And now, six years later, we’re talking about all over the place. So, you know, that was some really creative thinking there. And so that that, you know, it meant a lot that those nurses were already starting to think about transitioning to how technology could work differently for them. And that’s my wish.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Yeah. Well, it’s you know, you had mentioned in some of your and some of your work that engagement of clinical of the clinical and operational staff is, is, is not a nice to have. It’s essential if you’re going to do a clinical transformation. And I think this is it seems to me like a great example. This visualization process of hey, like what is what exactly are we trying to fix?

We know we’re trying to fix the system, but what is the system? And, you know, having people kind of scrounge around looking for paper that needs to be either thrown away because it doesn’t make any sense, it actually doesn’t bring any value, or it needs to be somehow incorporated into our new digital workflows, you know, kind of gets people engaged.

Are there other are there other ways that you’ve found to kind of engage, especially your clinical folks that you think are underutilized?

Dione Rogers:

So I think embedding digital into current processes. So we have a framework, in the UK called ward accreditation. So ward accreditation is it’s a really great initiative, generally led by the chief nurses that looked at, how the, the ward itself operates across a range of metrics. So rather than doing individual quality audits, they, assess against a range of things.

And so say things like, you know, again, that forms data that can play. But we added digital into this a couple of years ago because what what we were saying was digital shouldn’t be something on the side. It should be that golden thread through what people do. And actually then how do we get digital to be recognized as something that nursing staff in particular, being the biggest data importers of healthcare data?

Kind of learn and embrace. So we started to talk to them about, well, what would be the things that would really help to collect the right data to understand the right technology that your ward is going to be using, etc.. So they bring entire staff into those digital arenas. And what they what they start to see was come and present to us what they were doing around digital.

And the biggest impact was that digital champions. So they started to nominate those people on the ward areas that were really interested and started to then disseminate the learning that they were having on those ward areas and then build it into an accreditation module. So in order to be a ward, got to go out. You had to have some really good digital champions.

You have to demonstrate that you were engaging in the training, engaging in the use of data that you were really thinking about how you could become more paperless, but not just for the sake of being paperless, for the sake of helping with your quality of care. And so they really helped those wards really helped to shape it.

And the pride when they got to go saying, you know, we’re we’re now starting to move into this digital era. And actually now because it was all on Excel spreadsheets and things and then say, we want this to be digitized. We want the system, we want the data to be digitized. How can we do this? You know, it was a really good way.

Rather than saying, you know, you have to do this training. So I think embedding it in how the world works and what they value, speaking to them, going to watch what’s happening. I went on to more than just took some pictures of the vast amount of folders and said, do you better pick these up? How are the policies kept up today in these folders?

What would your world look like if you got rid of all of this? You know, and people were like, because again, you don’t see what’s in your own slides sometimes. So again, that visualization of going, do you see this and what have you to do about it? So I think that whole thing of being with them, going to speak to them, but not enough pushing digital or technology on people, it’s find a nice sweet spot that really can help them and help them to be proud in their ward areas and the care that they’re delivering.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Yeah, so not technology for the sake of technology, but for actually improving the care that people can deliver and helping them to do it in a, in a, in a better way. So it works for them as well as for the patient. Yeah, that that makes sense. And I, I love how you kind of, frame that, which is what, what do you care about.

Oh, you care about the getting this ward certification. How can we incorporate this, this digital transformation into that so that you’re really not working towards anything different than what you would have been working towards five years ago? It’s still it’s still all right there.

Dione Rogers:

And I guess one of the, one of the things that really worked, we ran a competition to design our digital Champions logo, and one of the staff, we won that competition. It was kind of a, superhero type person. But the role that I was in with is in north east London, which has a hugely diverse workforce and patient population.

And so they designed them with five different skin tones. And so the very generic looking wasn’t man, wasn’t female, but just different colors of skin. And so when we ran the paper picnic at that organization, we had our digital champions. So and you wouldn’t believe how much people wanted to become a digital champion to get hold of a badge that was the color of them.

And it was a great. But that again, came from staff. It wasn’t my idea. It came from staff. We incentivized the competition and we we then said, okay, what much else could we promote? The trust didn’t apply now. So we then have a whole load of mounts not made up with this character. You could choose your mouse.

Not the identified click. Yay! So things like that. Again, a real great visualization. We banned notebooks and said if we’re going digital, you know, we’re not having that much. We have a really good match on things that people really want. And we ended up having about 700 digital champions join also for that campaign. So yeah, great.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

It worked. It worked. All right. Well we are we are running low on time. I wanted to understand a little bit about your what you’re doing now. So you’ve been with the NHS for a long time I would presume. And you’ve you’ve pivoted recently. So tell us about that.

Dione Rogers:

Yeah. So I left the NHS officially on the 31st of March. I started my own company called the Flourishing Hub. This is digital advisory and AI ethics advisory alongside some coaching. I’ve just recently qualified as a coach as well. I’m very people orientated, as you can probably tell, and so that a bit of what I wanted to do.

So. So why did I do that? It was it was a quite a sudden decision really, and it was a moment of gut instinct to I think I have this epiphany. Or can I describe it as an epiphany? I had a couple of bereavements last year that were very difficult and suddenly thought.

What do I really want to do? I’m only doing what makes me happy. But it was my cup. And actually a couple of years ago, I completed a masters in AI and Data Analytics. And you can see my passion has been data all the way along. Now with the emerging AI platform, I’m like, we’ve just put in another EPR, we’re nowhere near my the role that I was doing actually fulfilling me.

And so I decided to give myself a year with passion project. So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve I’m not looking beyond a year. I’m giving much. And I think, you know, going to the conferences that I went to last year, meeting, you know, people like yourself stepping out of my NHS bubble that I’ve been in for a long time.

It felt just I needed to do this. And so I’m stepping into a bit of coaching. I’m doing some consultancy and the big project that I have coming up with a few colleagues is health care bioethics. So that’s where my passion is sitting. So how do we get the data and the ethical framework right before I really compounds healthcare, I do believe I will really help healthcare, but actually we have to have that good data quality, nice, good ethical guardrails in to make the best of it.

So I feel like this is the right time to do it. If not, it’s something that job. Another couple of years I think it would have passed me by. So I left. I left and said, I’m going to bet on myself. I think I’m going to be okay. And I’m so far absolutely loving. Loving it. I’m very busy, actually.

That’s the biggest problem. I’m very busy and it’s kind of where do I put my energies the most? But really I’m writing some books citing and some other books. I’m doing lots of things, but as long as I sit in my passion project portfolio, I’m. That’s all right.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Oh that’s awesome. That’s very exciting for you. Many of us dream about that and don’t do it. So yeah, glad to hear that you’ve done it. Well, we are now at the point where we’re going to ask. I ask you one final question, and it’s the same question I ask all my guests. Is there something that is in your life that’s so well designed?

It brings you joy whenever you interact with.

Dione Rogers:

Yes. And it’s a very random object. It’s a stove top, kettle.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

Fair enough. Tell us more.

Dione Rogers:

So we moved to the coast two years ago and we decided to. My partner retired from the place and decided that we wanted to do something around having a small holiday let. So we invested in, hand-built, handcrafted shepherds. So I don’t know whether you have them in the state that they’re kind of like a little kitchen and wood structure on wheels, a bit like a caravan, but not much more classy and, and quite cute and whimsical.

So we invested in that, and, we decided we would go eco and we overlook fields. We have a lot of wildlife, deer, owls and things in the field and then and then the say so we said we don’t really want to put loads of electricity into the area, so we have no TV in there. We have no wife buy in.

We have no plug sockets. We, we only have a stove top kettle. And so I found this beautiful, my favorite kind of rain. I love nature, this beautiful La Cruz de French stovetop enamel kettle. And it makes the most beautiful cup of tea. And as you know, we love our cups of tea in England. So at the end of the week, I go and make myself a cup of tea in this kettle and just switch off.

So it’s a beautiful it does exactly what it’s meant to do, makes a lovely cup of day. Looks brilliant. Look. Looks a really nice design. It’s kind of signs my week off.

Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA:

I love it, I love it. Well, that’s great. I, you know, I had mentioned before we started recording that I’d taken a look at this particular model and it’s it is quite lovely. I wasn’t able to find the green one. So I’m, I have to keep looking to see that particular shade of green, but, Well that’s awesome and thank you for sharing that with us.

We I it’s one of my favorite parts of the podcast is understanding what makes people tick and, and for you, it’s, a kettle that makes just a perfect, quintessential cup of tea. So terrific. Dione Rogers, thank you so much for joining us. And good luck on everything that you’re doing. And I look forward to kind of hearing back.

We should check in with you from time to time to to see how your adventures are progressing. Thanks again for joining us.

Dione Rogers:

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Craig, and good to see you again.

Outro:

Thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For more on Dione Rogers follow her on LinkedIn or at her Flourishing Hub Community.

Check back for more episodes of Designing for Health wherever you listen to podcasts or on NordicGlobal.com. We’ll see you again next time on Designing for Health.

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