Blockchain and What Doctors Should Know About It

The problems I saw throughout my time — as a medical student, a junior doctor, a surgical doctor, then an A&E registrar, and finally a fully qualified GP — all come down to one thing we call interoperability. Essentially, it's about having access to the health data for a particular patient regardless of where they've entered the health system. If I see a patient in a GP setting, I can't see their A&E records or their surgical notes, and vice versa.

Where this becomes a problem: as an A&E doctor, I'd be trying to send a patient home with antibiotics, and they'd have a deadly reaction to one of them — but they don't know which. They'd say, "My GP knows, why don't you ask them?" Well, it's 8pm on a Sunday and I don't think your GP is open right now. So there I am, playing Russian roulette with the patient's health, trying to decide which antibiotic to give and hoping it's not the one they're allergic to.

These health record problems are longstanding — not just digitally, but even in the paper era, for decades. Any clinician or patient will ask: why can't I have access to the information? Thankfully we've entered a digital age where the information is available and we can solve this. The idea behind Medicalchain is to empower patients to be the conduit that carries their medical data with them, wherever they go, so they can transport it from one clinical scenario to another.

This takes me back to my second year of GP training. I was doing cardiology at Leeds General Infirmary, a fantastic hospital with great staff. The one issue we kept having was something called a discharge summary — the document generated after a patient leaves hospital, summarising why they attended, their diagnosis, the treatment plan, and what the hospital wants the GP to follow up on.

The quality varied wildly. You'd have someone writing half an essay about chest pain that turned out to be anxiety, versus someone writing four lines about a very serious heart attack that needed stenting, a bypass, time in ITU. So I wanted to create a standardised template you could just click through, and it would generate exactly what's needed — the hospital information, the information for the GP. There's also a lot of non-clinical coding staff who go through these documents and pick out the poignant details — did the patient smoke, do they walk with a frame — because all of it generates money for the department. A poorly written discharge summary means a lot of money the department loses out on.

I had the idea, but I'm not a technical person at all. So I went to my brother-in-law, Mo, who's now the co-founder of Medicalchain. I said, "Mo, you're an experienced entrepreneur, you're a tech person, you've released a few apps into the App Store and exited a few companies. I've got this idea in medicine that I think could make a difference. Could you give me a hand?" And he said no.

Mo was too big and too important for me. He said, "I don't have time. There's one of those GoDaddy websites you can look at, they'll give you a template." So I left Mo and went to my wife's sister's husband — kind of my brother-in-law, but from the other side. Another techie guy. I said, "Bara" — we call him Barry — "I've got this idea, Mo's too big and important for me, could you help?" And he said, "Sure, maybe on the weekends or the evenings I'll help you code and we can put this website together."

So we built the website and launched it at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust. It also took off at University Hospital Lewisham, the Princess Royal, and the Queen Elizabeth. A few of the junior doctors there were using this free website as a template to generate these standardised documents. Then we got approached by a large pharmaceutical company who'd caught wind of what we were doing. They were impressed by the quality and the standardisation, because now their drugs weren't being missed off — being used for the full 12, 18 months. I won't use the drug's name, because it'll give away who the company was.

They said, "We really like it. We'd like to possibly purchase this idea off you, or get you writing other templates for us." So I went back to Barry and said, "I don't know, mate, what do you think?" He said, "I'm not a business person. Maybe we should ask a business person." So we went back to Mo: "Remember that idea? This is where we're up to, this is how it's grown, it's completely free, but there's potential to make a profit." Mo said, "Okay, if you were going to sell it, what would you sell it for?" I said, "Look, me and Barry aren't greedy people, but we put a few hours in, a few weekends. When we do the maths, we think £5,000."

Mo started laughing at us. "Number one, you're idiots. Number two, they spend £5,000 on Domino's pizzas for students in one day. What are you talking about?" Then he said, "Is this actually what you want to do?" I could tell he was taking me more seriously now. I said, "No — discharge summary was just a stepping stone, something within my capabilities. What I really want to do is Medicalchain. If I can get the right team around me, the right expertise, and the right financial backing, we might be able to pull this off."

So Mo became my co-founder, Barry dropped into the CTO role, and now we employ 16 people. We have an office in London and another in Chiasso, Switzerland, and we've grown from strength to strength over the past two years.

Definitely. Everyone looks at the Facebooks and Apples of this world and thinks you just jump immediately to the big idea. Maybe some people are geniuses, or maybe they're blessed with financial backing from the start. But for us mere mortals — we're not the Zuckerbergs of this world — you need to do what you're comfortable with, and you'll realise your strengths come to the surface.

I was never trained to be a CEO or someone's boss. My only qualification is in medicine, and it remains only in medicine. But I found there are lots of skills medicine teaches you that are transferable: being a leader, being a team player, delegating, prioritising. All of that started falling into place when it came to hiring, firing, pivoting, raising funds.

There are many explanations — blockchain is a broad subject, encompassed within distributed ledger technology. The dumbed-down version: number one, what is it? Simply put, it removes the middleman.

The middleman is anybody you need to authenticate information. Say I want to buy your house. I need a lawyer on my side to confirm I have the money and the mortgage is in place. We need a lawyer on your side to say you actually have the deeds. The lawyers talk and vouch for each other, and the deed is done. Blockchain removes this middleman. The authenticity is achieved by having a decentralised, distributed network where everybody holds a ledger with the same information.

Picture a room of ten people. All ten know that Mustafa owns the house and all ten know that I have the money. For us to make the transaction, everyone in the room witnesses it. So if I came along the following week and said, "Mustafa, when are you giving me that house?" — no, we all witnessed it, he gave you the house and you transferred the money. That's the distributed part: it's spread amongst the ten people. It's decentralised because they're not all my friends or all your friends — we represent different entities, so there's no bias. And a ledger means we all hold an identical copy of the data being transacted.

For medical records, we want a distributed, decentralised system where we can prove the authenticity of the data right back to its source — which clinic or hospital it was generated in, which clinician authenticated it. So when the patient brings that data to their next appointment, to a clinician they've never met, they can rest assured it's authentic, correct, and hasn't been corrupted, altered or tampered with. Did that make sense?

You start with one idea, realise the problems with it, and work backwards. The idea was empowering patients to have access to their medical records. We all have smartphones with our photos, emails and banking details on them — so why can't we be trusted to have our own medical records there too? And not in a simple capacity like the NHS app, but across primary and secondary care, locally, nationally, internationally. A health passport, where you carry your information and you are the conduit moving it from one appointment to another. When a consultation finishes, whatever the doctor's written should immediately upload to your device, so that if you go to another clinic tomorrow, the data is there and accessible.

The problem we realised: how do you prove the authenticity of that data? There are health apps that let you fill in your own conditions and medications, at what dose and why. As a clinician, I can't work with that. I can't have a patient I've never met turn up and say, "I'm on morphine five times a day, I'm new to the city, I've run out and I'm in so much pain, please give me morphine." The truthful answer is, I'm sorry, we'll have to go back to your original GP, we'll have to — crazy notion — fax it over and prove you're actually on that medication. By which time you've probably turned up to A&E because you were in so much pain, because you weren't lying. But I can't give that medication without enough proof.

We actually already do this in medicine a lot. Many patients come from abroad — from Europe, say — with a bit of paper with a doctor's name at the top, some hospital somewhere in Poland, saying, "This was my last scan, I was told I need another." I don't know if they've made it up. I don't know the credentials of that doctor, or if it's even a real hospital. What I do is use my judgment: they're asking for an ultrasound, it won't hurt them, it's not expensive, they can't really abuse it, and it matches their symptoms and story. Fine, I'll book it — because a random doctor in Poland said I should, in three months' time.

We need to move beyond this. The way data is flowing, the way healthcare is maturing into health tourism and international care, people want to carry their information with them and not be restricted in which clinician they can see. They want choice. And the only way to provide choice is to let them take their information from clinic to clinic — not have this GP practice monopolise your data, so it's either this GP or no one, because no one else can access it and help you.

Honestly, the possibilities are not limitless — that's the first thing to say. With blockchain or AI, people get carried away and decide, right, we're going to blockchain everything, we're going to AI the toaster. It's not going to become Terminator. Some things benefit from these technologies and some don't. Whenever I give a talk about the company, you'd be surprised how little I mention blockchain. I hope in the future it'll be like saying we use the internet to book flights or a taxi — that's neither here nor there, it's just the tech behind it. What I'm more interested in is: what problem are you solving, and how?

There are many ways you could use a distributed, decentralised ledger. Take organ transplants: we have a real headache with the national register, working out who's where on the list to receive which organ. With a smart contract on the blockchain, the moment somebody dies and an organ becomes available, the contract triggers and shows this patient is ready to receive it. You wouldn't have scandals where a famous or important person jumps the queue. You'd do the same with blood transfusions, and with pharmaceutical drugs — proving their authenticity and tracing the whole supply chain back to where they were originally sourced. There are many elements of blockchain that could be used in healthcare, but we're so overstretched we can't move into those other fields yet.

Definitely. It just needs the marketplace to be approached and matured in the right way, with the right stakeholders in the conversation. All data is valuable — you already see it online, with all these surveys: complete this and we'll give you a £10 voucher, just for some rubbish little survey.

The fact you quoted — medical records being worth ten times a stolen credit card — makes sense when you think about it. If someone steals your credit card, you call the bank, cancel the transaction, get a new card, and move on with your life. You can't do that with your identity or your health records. Once it's been hacked or stolen, it's gone — it's in the ether, on the black market, and people are making false insurance claims with your details. So it's something we should really protect and keep a close eye on.

We've accepted it's a valuable asset, and it's your asset — it's an exact diary of every medical condition you've had, the medications you've tried, the ups and the downs. Drug companies really value what they call patient-reported outcomes: what has the patient's journey been like on their drug? Imagine a system showing the chronological medical record — what was discussed with the doctor, when the drug was issued, what strength, for how long — alongside the patient's own journal: "I started drug A, I felt good, then I felt bad, then I was a bit nauseous, we reduced the dose, and now I feel great."

As a tech company we obviously want to be involved in that space. But where I think the ethics has gone wrong is that you shouldn't be selling the patient's data. What you should do instead is broker those conversations. I'd like patients to opt in to be approached by pharmaceutical companies, researchers, non-profits. If someone's looking for a 50-year-old Asian man with diabetes, and this gentleman has opted in to be contacted, we act as the patient's advocate. When they're offered something like "50p for your records for a week," we step in: actually, it's worth £100 to them — which is still infinitely cheaper for the company than harvesting the data from a clinic or hospital, which isn't transparent and doesn't involve the patient. And you've missed a trick by not engaging the patient — who is, at the end of the day, the customer you're trying to sell to. You want the patient to tell their doctor, "I didn't like inhaler A, I preferred inhaler B," and the doctor's happy to comply. How will you get patients on side if you haven't involved them from the beginning? So, going back to what I said: remove the middlemen, get the connection going directly between the two actors. And as a company, we might benefit financially from brokering those deals.

On the NHS, I'd say the jury's still out. We're a relatively young company still finding our way through this space. And the one criticism I'd make of the NHS is that there's no clear pathway — no "fill in form A, attend event B, speak to person C, and then you're in a position to promote what you're doing and speak to the right people." This is part of the growing pains of the company, and the pressure on my shoulders as CEO.

For example, I was presenting our tech to one of the CCGs — clinical commissioning groups — who absolutely loved it. They said, "This is exactly what we need, it would solve a lot of our problems." Then one of the ladies asked, "Are you part of the DPS framework?" I gave her an odd look — I'd never heard of it. She explained the DPS framework is where the approved online suppliers sit, for them to select from. If you're an approved supplier, they just choose who they want and NHS England foots the bill. If you're not on it, and they want you, they have to pay for you themselves — which isn't going to happen.

Nobody had ever told me this. Nobody gave me a heads up. There's nowhere to find it, it's not easy to come across at all. Unless you speak to people in the space, no one points you in the right direction. Thankfully, after applying and going through the process, we're now on the DPS framework as an approved online consultation platform. But these are the challenges: every process takes six to nine months to turn around, and that's six to nine months of runway you're burning through. As a startup you have a certain length of runway, and you need your product out there generating revenue as soon as possible, because you've got bills to pay.

A very good anecdote was told to me by another entrepreneur, Harry, from mHealth. Someone had asked him, "What's it like doing a startup?" He said, "It's the equivalent of jumping out of a plane and trying to build your parachute before you hit the ground." I thought that was really apt — you take a leap of faith, then realise the ground is closing in very quickly, and you've got to build this parachute so you have a soft landing. That soft landing is essentially your product succeeding. So the NHS isn't straightforward: a lot of bureaucracy, and it'll cost you a lot of money while you figure out how to navigate the system.

On competing with the behemoths — well, if you've got Coca-Cola, what's the point of Pepsi? If you've got McDonald's, what's the point of Burger King? There are always new and better products coming out. When I was at university around 2005, Imperial had just been added to Facebook — back then it was only for universities, you couldn't join as some random worker, and now it's open to absolutely everyone. We've been through so many iterations of social media that Facebook's no longer the popular one; it's all about Instagram or Twitter. It's the same with health records: everyone's coming at it with their own approach. The health space is a massive industry — telemedicine alone, video consultations, is worth over $50 billion, and that's just a small nugget of healthcare. So there's enough space for us to get involved and grow, and who knows — maybe to achieve something great we'll need to collaborate with one of the big boys. We'll see how it goes.

It sounds cheesy, but you can't do it without the team around you — and I mean the personal team as well as the professional one. The personal team is my wife, trying to fall asleep at three in the morning with my laptop open and the bright screen keeping her awake while I'm talking to someone in Japan. She's been very understanding and had to tolerate a lot, and I hope she's now starting to see the benefits of going through that journey with me. Same with my parents. I used to be a surgical trainee and I moved into GP on purpose, to give myself the headspace to think about what I actually wanted to do — because I think I can do more than purely clinical practice, and I'm interested in doing more.

Negotiating that career change with my dad wasn't easy. He was upset: "My son's meant to be a surgeon, what the hell are you doing?" I said, "Dad, honestly, if this works out, trust me, it's good for us as a family." Thankfully he's come to terms with it, though he still brings it up: "Can't you go back to surgery now, son?" There are cultural issues there — a surgeon is rated much more highly than a family doctor — but that's a conversation for another day.

Then there's the professional team: doctors who understood what I was trying to do. There were many points in my medical career where I faced an ultimatum: continue with medicine, or not. It's so sad to speak to other medics who had to make the ultimate sacrifice and give up their medical career to pursue their passion. I've been very fortunate to have really good trainers and educational tutors who guided me, supported me, tolerated what I was doing and treated me as a special case — all on the proviso that I passed and progressed. If I ever ran into difficulties, failed exams or didn't pass parts of my training, it would be over. And thankfully I was blessed to get through training full-time, no sabbatical, no time off, just powered through it while building the company at the same time.

There's a saying I've had since secondary school: minimum effort, maximum attainment. And if you look at my grades, that's literally how I've lived my life. I failed so many exams — at medical school, even postgraduate surgery exams — until I finally passed them, and the reason is that something else needed my attention at that point. Sometimes it is minimum effort to get the maximum attainment. So I've become very good at prioritising. Some things are important and urgent — do them now. Some are just urgent. Some are just important, so give them your time. And then there's the category of not urgent and not important: I'll get to that later.

It's also important that your task list isn't just work and professional things. You need a task list for yourself. I might say, "I want to learn a new language by the time I'm 40." That's nothing to do with work — where does it fit? So there have to be different lists for different areas. I've split my work streams into clear divisions, and that's what keeps me organised. There's my GP work — I'm still an active GP, I still do my clinics, I still see my patients, and I use it in an almost therapeutic way. Because I don't do it to the extent other clinicians do, I don't feel like I'm burning out; if anything I look forward to seeing my patients, which is a great experience for them and an even better one for me. Then there's the business, with its own time and pressures, where every day is an unknown step forward and there's more pressure to make key decisions. And finally there's doing things like this podcast, and my own YouTube channel — if you search "The Antidote NHS" on YouTube you'll find one of my videos.

That ties into building an influencer profile, which I realised very early is important — and I don't mean an Instagram following. I mean when you see an injustice occurring, you need to be in the conversation to turn it around. You can't stand outside and try to make a difference; it doesn't work. So I've made it my business to be involved in as many programmes and societies as I can, because I want to give back, I want to help, and I want to influence decisions — for my benefit and for the doctors coming after me. I'm part of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, one of five doctors on the Royal College of GPs' Innovator Mentorship Programme, Vice Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners' Yorkshire Faculty, and I recently sat on a board at NHS Digital. All of them are very time-consuming and need their own dedication — but minimum effort, maximum attainment for each one.

The honest answer is that nobody's figured it out. I've only been in this two years, and I look at people who've been in the space longer than me. There's a great guy called Jean who did Touch Surgery — when I was a medical student he was already a doctor, starting his company and doing all this, and I remember looking up to him. But even if you asked Jean now, "What's the blueprint to get into medtech?", he couldn't tell you. And if you ask me, I can't tell you either. What I can say is: it's important to surround yourself with these kinds of characters. We're very lucky that everything is digital now — it's very easy to contact someone on LinkedIn, similar to how you and I met and got down to organising this podcast.

If you're interested in medtech, there are so many courses, events and podcasts now that you're naturally going to develop the language and vocabulary of the field, which expands how you think about a problem. What's difficult in this tech-business world is that everybody thinks they need to be the boss — and not everybody is cut out to be. Some people are better as the chief medical officer, or the chief operating officer. That just means your strength is that you're clued up on how the medical side works, the bureaucracy and legislation, or you're a very organised person who knows how to motivate people. You don't have to be the ideas person, or the one who stands on stage and gives the talks. So don't limit yourself, don't put up restrictions. If you want to be involved in medtech there's something for everyone, and you shouldn't be put off seeing someone really going for it and wanting to lead their company. Good for them — it might not suit your personality or your skill set, but that doesn't mean there's no role for you. It's a growing area and we need all kinds of people.

I think it's important to put yourself forward. Throughout medical school a lot of us are encouraged to complete an audit or a quality improvement project, and those are opportunities where you're given time to focus on a problem. Look at it realistically: how could I solve this? An issue we have in the medtech world — in the presentation I gave earlier, I was showing the audience there are over 50,000 healthcare apps on the Google Play Store now. Everyone thought their idea was really good, but it's a tsunami of health applications. What you really have to question is: what problem were they trying to solve? Some people build something and then retrospectively fit it to a problem. You need to get your ducks in the right order — identify a problem, which you have ample opportunity to do on the wards or in your placements, then see what the solution may be. It might not need to be a technical solution. It might just be pointing people to an app that already exists.

By being outspoken and involved, seeing the problems from the inside, you use your credibility as one of the clinical people: find out what the real problems are, how they affect people on the ground, and think of a true solution. That's what people are looking for. If you just come with a solution but it's not actually solving anyone's problem, no one's interested.

The final bit of this very long answer: not every good idea is a business idea. That's really important to emphasise. You might be on the ward and see a healthcare assistant struggling to write down everyone's blood pressure, and think, "You know what, they really could do with an iPad — let them document everything digitally, and we'll plumb it all back into the system." Brilliant idea. But where's the business case? Who's going to make money, who's going to pay for it, where's the profit margin, where's the scalability? I've had lots of friends pitch ideas to me and say, "What do you think?" And I'll say, "It's a great idea — but were you doing it just to produce a great idea? Because that's what it is, and you should run with it. But if you're thinking, I'll give up my day job and build a business around this, I don't see where your business case is."

If you look at me, I spent a lot of time meandering through my training — surgical trainee, A&E doctor, finally completing my GP training. The importance of completing training, in one guise or another, is that I'm now basically the equivalent of a consultant. I have no more training to do, and I can go out and sell my services either in an NHS capacity or a private one. I'm my own boss. If Medicalchain were to die tomorrow — we ran out of money, we failed — nobody can take away from me that I'm a GP. I can still support my family, I've learned a lot of lessons along the way, and I could create a new company, be a director on another health-tech company, or just go on being a normal GP.

So the question your audience has to ask themselves is: how confident are they in their idea, that they think they're definitely going to succeed? Don't get me wrong — if I were Mark Zuckerberg and someone showed me a pile of a billion dollars, it'd be a no-brainer whether to leave med school or foundation training. But I'm telling you, as someone who raised $24 million: I did not leave medicine. I completed my training and I still actively practise as a doctor, because I don't think we should take for granted the privilege of this fantastic career, the degree we've got, and the experience and knowledge we have to help people. In one way or another, we have a bit of a duty to help.

Now, you might assume I'm doing 40 hours of clinical work a week. I'm not — only about 12 hours, which adds up to roughly two days. It's not that big a commitment, and because of it I stay fresh and look forward to seeing my patients. It's still a very fulfilling, interesting job. It also, 100%, gives me credibility. Many doctors have left medicine to pursue a career outside it, and you'll never take away that they're doctors — but I've noticed it's harder to have that credibility when talking about what's happening on the ground now: new government changes to primary care networks, how they'll impact people day to day. Because I'm mixing with GPs, because I'm part of these boards, because I'm an active clinician, I get this inside knowledge. It's not just things you can read online — sometimes you have to pick up the atmosphere of your colleagues, know where things are heading, which direction the profession is moving in. If you take yourself out of medicine, especially prematurely, and things don't work out, then unfortunately you've squandered a great opportunity — and you'll be stuck at this locum middle-grade SHO level, which is not high-paying and is very tough work. As it is, I locum as a GP 12 hours a week and it's financially very rewarding, probably better than most people's income, and it affords me the time to get on with the other work I need to do.

Sadly, to answer your question for today's purposes, no — it's not all equal. I was pursuing a career in ENT to start with, and you realise the sheer dedication those guys have — it's an apprenticeship. You can't turn up and say, "I've done a hundred of these cases, can I be the consultant now?" when the lady next to you has done a thousand. If I wanted someone operating on me, I'd want her, not him. Likewise, if you finish training and want to put yourself forward for a consultant post, they're looking for a colleague as committed to the department as they are. They can't have someone who says, "I'll parachute in now and again for a few meetings, a few clinics and a few operations, but most of the time I'm travelling the world doing my tech stuff and I don't know my timetable week to week." It's not compatible.

And not just that — if you go for an interview at one of these hospital specialties, there's a queue of people behind you who want that post. Their kids are in local schools, their husband or wife works in the area, it's a good place for them, and they're happy to commit to a traditional full-time clinical role in that hospital. You can't compete with them when you come along with your half-arsed, part-time, "let me give it a go and I'm not fully committed to you." When it comes to GP, it doesn't mean I'm half-arsed and part-time and not committed to anyone — I am committed — but the difference is it's a lot more flexible, because we're not depending on other people. When you're a surgeon you need the anaesthetist, the scrub nurse, all the auxiliary staff, and you all have to be there at the same time. In GP, all I need is a desk and a room. A clinic might ask, "Abdullah, could you come at so-and-so time, see so-and-so patients, and leave at so-and-so time?" And I'll say, "No, I can't, I've got meetings — but I'll still do the three-hour shift, I'll just come a bit later and leave a bit later. Is that okay?" "That's absolutely fine, as long as you're seeing that volume of patients in opening hours." So it's very flexible. And you're not the first to do it — rightly or wrongly, the GP profession is very locum-heavy at the moment, which is financially not a great thing for the NHS, but that's a much bigger discussion for another day. There's a whole industry now where it's normal to approach a clinic and say, "I'm a locum, do you have anything you need me doing for a few hours a week?"

You can't have regrets — it's all part of growing up. You can't be an adult from day one; even though you're biologically an adult, maturity-wise... it sounds patronising, and I'm only 33, but I've definitely grown up a lot in the past few years. The advice I'd give my younger self is to spend more time developing myself. A lot of time was wasted playing Pro Evolution Soccer — FIFA wasn't a big deal back then, it was Pro Evo 5 with Thierry Henry, which is going back a while. But developing myself more — not necessarily to do with tech or business or healthcare, but expanding my mind: listening more to philosophers, to intelligent debates, challenging myself. You might not agree with what someone's saying, but some people carry themselves in such an impressive way. Those are the lessons I've learned from watching TED talks and other motivational material online: we each have some skill set within us, and it's not about looking at your weaknesses and trying to turn those into strengths — it's about looking at your strengths and improving on those to make yourself even stronger.

I'm never going to be the sensitive, cuddly type — that's just not my personality. My friends and family know I'm very direct, very cutting with my words. It comes from a good place, but this is my personality, so I need to build on that strength and make sure I'm doing things the right way, developing that part of me to be more effective for what I'm trying to achieve for me and those around me. There's no point trying to be more sensitive; it's not going to suit me and it'll just waste everyone's time.

One thing I came across recently, part of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, was something called Belbin. It was essentially a questionnaire — I gave it to four of my executive team to complete about me, and I completed it about myself. It splits personality types into different people: the organiser, the thinker, the motivator, whoever you are. It was really great to see how I'd scored myself compared to how my team saw me. And it doesn't just tell you what kind of person you are — which isn't that surprising — what was really surprising was the advice that came attached. It said, "If you're this type of person you should work on this, and watch out that you're at risk of upsetting people" — which I knew, but it's a reminder to keep myself in check going forward. It also tells you what kind of people you need around you, because you can't be a jack of all trades. And somehow, by the grace of God, the people who surround me actually fit into those other categories that support my personality type. I think that's why we formed such a good team without realising it — our personalities come together and fill in each other's weaknesses, and that's why we've got a very well-rounded team to push ourselves onto the next big thing.

Everyone's an individual — I can only tell you about my journey and my experiences. I've been very blessed and fortunate along the whole way. Everybody has their own challenges, so don't be too hard on yourself. The one thing I'd say is that one of my qualities is that I don't give up. I didn't get into medical school first time round — four straight rejections, no interviews. But I applied again. I failed exams throughout medical school and did the resits. I failed my surgical postgraduate exams and passed them eventually. I did a career change from surgery to GP. This idea that you don't give up and keep going forward is the strongest thing anybody needs to succeed at anything — and don't be scared to try. Even if you fail, it doesn't mean you're not capable of it; it just means you need to approach it differently.

It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.