Networking in Healthcare 101

I think there are a few different ways of approaching this. There's the very direct need you'll have at different times in your career, when you're looking for an opportunity for yourself. You talked about maybe leaving medicine after F2 — that's a very clear window when you'll be reaching out to all these interesting people you've spoken to via the podcast, saying, "I'm thinking of transitioning out of medicine, just wondered what's going on." Because you've got that warm connection, it can be a very informal reach out — let's have a chat and catch up — and things may transpire from that conversation that you find interesting and pursue. So yes, directly to help your career, reaching out at those windows of opportunity is definitely useful.

But much more importantly, once you've spoken with someone on the podcast, they're kind of in your network. And there are so many ways you can create value for each other over the years that you may not even foresee right now. That's going to help you with whatever job you're doing, whatever company you might start, any endeavour you embark on — that network of people will always be able to help you. The best way it happens is unprompted: they'll just say, "Oh, I came across this thing," or "I'm looking for someone to help me with this, can you help?" And equally, you might reach out and say, "I just read this and thought of you."

So once you've broken the ice with someone, it's a very organic nurturing of that relationship over time, and you'll definitely see the benefits. But I don't think you need a grand design or strategic plan around it, because that can be jarring for people when they feel like it's transactional. It's going to be an incredibly rich network you can tap into in the long term. The benefits won't demonstrate themselves immediately, but over the course of your career it's going to be incredibly helpful — not just for finding opportunities, but for really thriving in the ones you're in, because you'll be able to access collaborations and partnerships you couldn't have without that network.

A lot of people do this, and it can be very useful. I think it also comes down to your personality. I do enjoy talking to people and learning new things, but I'm not that keen on having conversations for the sake of it, or putting a specific cadence against a business relationship or a friendship. I'd find it quite stressful and less than pleasant if I suddenly had a series of calls with people I've connected with over the years just to have a general catch-up — because if there isn't anything specific to talk about or achieve, it can feel like a bit of a waste of time.

What I think is really valuable is exactly what you did the other day, when you messaged me to say, "I saw this thread on Twitter — Christina Farr talking about YouTube — thought it might be something you'd want to follow up on." That's a really useful reach out, and those are the things I appreciate. That said, I do get messages, and send them from time to time, saying, "Shall we catch up for a coffee?" — and you don't know what that could lead to. But honestly, at some point you end up with so many contacts and acquaintances that where do you draw the line? I could do that with hundreds of people a year, and it's like, what will that achieve versus the more organic reach out? So I just prefer that approach.

The other thing a lot of people do, which can be helpful, is a summary of their last year — reflections on the year — sent out to a large number of people, saying, "If you're interested in catching up on any of this, click the link." That can be really helpful, because you've shared a lot of information and people may want to pick up on one or two things, and then you have a very focused conversation. So that's something you can do at the end of each year — at least you give people a hook to latch on to.

Just to be clear — you mean from the perspective of how that person would feel receiving a message like that?

Look, this world of healthcare — and if you narrow it to digital health, or clinicians doing interesting things — those worlds are all very small, especially with a predominantly UK filter on it. And they're full of mostly well-intentioned people trying to help each other, who recognise that part of the reason they've got where they are is that they've always helped each other and grown the community around them. So an opportunity to recommend someone from their network to go on your podcast is actually a valuable thing to offer them. Some people just like to talk and have interesting conversations; others have something at a particular moment that they want the world to know about. For either reason, there'll be lots of people who'd say, "Yes, I'd want to be on the podcast — thank you for alerting me to the opportunity."

So if you were to ask me that, I think it's really valuable for me to be able to connect you with someone, for that person to be able to come on your podcast. You shouldn't worry about how it comes across, because it's of value across the whole chain. And it's much easier now for you — you've got an established podcast, you've had some really good people on it, you ask some really interesting questions. There's a track record there, so people would probably find it quite a privilege to take the time to speak with you. I think it's a valuable thing you can offer people, honestly.

I think it's somewhere in the middle. Every podcast — you could apply this to anything — has to have an angle to be interesting, a theme it sticks to. So when you ask people, "Do you know anyone I could speak with for the podcast?", it helps if they either already know the theme, or you say in your email, "I skew towards X, Y, Z type of people." That makes it clear this isn't a random "I'll speak to anyone" thing — this person has an approach in mind. It also makes it easier for them to narrow down, because if you just say "Is there anyone you'd recommend?", the honest answer is, "Well, there are probably 10 or 20 people I can think of immediately," which isn't so helpful.

Equally, saying "I want to speak to this one specific person" — I think you have to be careful with that. It's not always the nicest email to receive, because the person can feel like maybe the whole relationship was predicated on you being able to get to someone very specific through them — especially if it's an investor or whatever. You almost feel a bit like, "Was this whole thing transactional?" So I'd be careful with that type of reach out. It's very different if you do it as a one-off — not for the podcast, but because you genuinely are looking for funding, say. That's totally fine. But if you do it recurrently for the podcast, that's not ideal.

Absolutely. It makes life easier for the person you're asking, but it also makes you and your podcast come across much better, because it signals, "Okay, this is the approach this podcast is taking." It doesn't have to be a type of person — it could be, "These are the types of things I like to talk about, so is there anyone in your network who'd be interesting to talk to about these topics?" So it can be a specific type of person or a specific set of topics — but there has to be something specific in the ask when you make it.

The truth is that more recently I haven't done much of that — people have come to me more, and that's because I've been in a settled job for a few years and not looking for a new opportunity. The kids keep me so busy that I'm not necessarily looking to network to explore opportunities. But previously, what I've done — usually to help me find a new job — is to reach out to people, ideally people I already know.

Sometimes it's very direct. My job prior to this, I was working at Reckitt, the consumer healthcare company, and I saw a role open there. I knew the director in that team from previous interactions at Ada, so I reached out and said, "Could we speak about this role? It seems interesting." That's very easy for them to respond to, because there's something tangible coming out of it. There were also times in the US where I was interested in interviewing doctors and entrepreneurs for the Doctorpreneurs website — partly because I just wanted to understand how those businesses work, what the business model is. Again, it was a specific ask that would lead to a specific outcome: "Would you be interested in meeting to discuss being interviewed for the website?"

So I've always been happy to reach out to people, ideally ones I already know — but you only have to loosely know someone to feel comfortable reaching out, because at the end of the day, if people want to help you, they're not going to question how well they know you first. They'll think, "This is an interesting ask, you seem credible, I recall we've bumped into each other a couple of times" — and that's enough. If someone ignores your message, it's not because they don't know you well enough. So I'm a big believer in reaching out to get something done — ideally with a specific ask. Honestly, I don't love the reach outs that come to me sometimes saying, "Would love to have a chat or a catch-up." I'll usually do it, because I don't like to be obstructive, but I'm not massively looking forward to it, because I don't know if it's going to create any value for either side. As long as there's something you're trying to achieve — while making sure it's not fully transactional, that there's some value being created — I'm very happy to reach out.

I don't know, actually. I think it's more that at the moment in my life I've got a steady job and I'm just really busy with young kids, so I don't have time to explore too many additional things. But I'd like to think that as I get older and the kids need less of my time, I'll go back into an explore phase. And actually, as you get older, your explore phase can become even more prolific — because you're at a stage where you have more to offer people, your network is larger, and the chances of people responding positively to a request for collaboration or partnership are higher, because you've got that much more credibility from being more senior.

So it's a life-stage thing for me. When you're not in explore mode, you're not really creating much value. I am very much in explore mode for the day job — reaching out to people who could help with the specific objectives of my current role at YouTube. But I'm not in a more general, extracurricular explore mode at the moment. I'll hopefully get back to that soon, because for me, life is fun and satisfying when I'm exploring different opportunities, with multiple initiatives on the go with different people. So I actually think you could be in even greater explore mode as you get older, with a bit more time, more credibility behind you, and a bigger network.

Oh yeah, definitely. Maybe with the exception of your very first job — where there's a pipeline of graduate vacancies and a fairly open, transparent, democratic process, because there are so many available and not much differentiates one person from the next. But as soon as you move beyond that first job, it's all about the third door. It's not that the whole process is circumvented — the third door gets you in the door, but you still have to execute. All the jobs I've had, except my NHS gigs, came through this third-door approach, but I then still had to execute against a bunch of other people, some of whom made it to that interview via the conventional route. You just have a much higher chance of getting to the interview stage — or, in a business context, of being on the final shortlist to close a deal with a customer — if you go through that third door. So I think it's critical after the first job in your career.

Where you have roles that are fairly autonomous, with a blank canvas — and those are the types of roles I gravitate towards, I've had a few recently — you have to be incredibly careful what you go after. Depending on your product or organisation, it could be that everyone wants to partner with you. If I look at it from the context of a partnership or collaboration, you have to quite quickly identify the opportunities that make sense and the ones that don't. Because even if you ultimately say no to someone — you didn't promise them anything, didn't commit — if you've worked something up with them over a few conversations and then say no, that already leaves a bit of a bad taste.

So I come across it all the time, and you have to be really careful about whether you even want to take the first call. There's a lot of research or projecting you can do about a potential collaboration before you even have that call. I've definitely been guilty of having a lot of first calls. Sometimes they're good, because they build your network. But unless you shut it down quickly and clearly afterwards, when you know it's not going to go anywhere, you create a time sink for both of you — they keep reaching back every few months to "check in and see what's happening." And once you've had that first call, it's actually very difficult a few months later to say, "Actually, I don't think we should have any more calls." You've shown yourself willing to engage, so you kind of have to keep up the pretence of those regular catch-ups. So you have to be really careful assessing an opportunity from day zero, if possible, and shutting it down quickly.

It's interesting. I think there are two lenses. One is the type of person you are. There are people who, by nature, will be workaholics throughout their life — so it's not so much "I'll work really hard for ten years so I can enjoy life afterwards," because those types aren't the ones who actually enjoy kicking back and relaxing. They genuinely enjoy the hard work; they're driven by the adrenaline rush of a deal, of meeting tight deadlines. There will always be those people.

Now, are they more successful than others? That's the other lens: the company or organisation you're in, and to some extent the industry — although if I call it the industry, it feels impossible to be a maverick and buck the trend, so I think it's more of a company thing. There are certain company cultures that lend themselves to working really hard. So if you're a workaholic who ends up in one of those companies, then yes, you do better, succeed, earn more money. But if you're a workaholic who ends up in a more relaxed environment — somewhere like Google, where people have a really good work-life balance — I actually think the people with the good balance do better there. At Google you're not just rewarded for the day job, but for the contribution you make to the wider community: diversity and inclusion initiatives, sports activities, social events, volunteering. There are so many opportunities, and you're genuinely rewarded for participating alongside good performance in your day job. So a classic workaholic in a place like that can be seen as slightly abrasive, rubbing people up the wrong way — and once they become a manager, creating an environment that doesn't work at a company like Google, where not everyone's interested in running themselves into the ground until midnight every day.

But then, if you look at some consulting firms with their crazy hours, that's effectively a requirement — you can't be successful there unless you put in those hours. So there's a group of people who do the hard yards initially, don't actually like it, know they want better balance, but do it because it pays well and it's a sensible platform for their career. A lot of people do banking or law for a few years, then look back and say, "Honestly, that was terrible — I can't think of many positive things that came out of it, but I got good skills on my CV that let me move into another industry and thrive." So if I'm honest, the majority of industries and companies aren't massively workaholic cultures. There are exceptions, and there are always people who'll be workaholics — but workaholics have to be really careful when they become managers, because if you set that example for your team, that's not a healthy environment.

The one exception to all of this is entrepreneurs. The true pioneers trying to do something groundbreaking and different are going to have to work crazy hours all the time — that's probably the only way to succeed when you're growing a business. Once the company's established, they may be able to take a foot off the gas. But until then, they'll always have to be workaholics.

Just to zoom out and address the broader point about the media shift — I think it's completely right, and actually massively encouraging. There's now a much greater diversity of voices and topics being pushed out for the public to pick and choose what they're interested in, rather than it being decided by a group of people in a room who think they know the right answer. That's the beauty of YouTube: it's up to individual creators and channels to decide what content they put out — within reason; we have our community guidelines. But there's such a range and variety of content, and of the ways that content is formatted, so its accessibility massively increases too — in terms of language, helping the visually impaired, helping different cultures access the right information. So it's a really exciting shift in media.

It's exciting for healthcare media as well, but it's slower to happen — as with everything in healthcare, innovations come to the sector, just more slowly. You still see lots of patient leaflets being handed out, static consent forms people are asked to read and sign, a culture where you have to go to the doctor to get information about your condition. So the shift will take longer, but there'll definitely be a move towards empowering the individual, giving them the resources to access information themselves, and a much greater variety of resources available. Say you've just been diagnosed with diabetes — you could have five or ten channels talking about that journey: some from the medical perspective, some sharing patient stories, journals covering the latest research, cultural or religious organisations covering the aspects relevant to them. It's a really exciting time for people who are willing to take the initiative with their condition. And it's not just media consumption — it's the digital health apps that empower patients, remote patient monitoring, and so on. That's part of what we're trying to push with our work at YouTube Health. It'll take time, but I think it's a very positive thing happening across the whole media landscape.

It's tricky. At YouTube we think of the four Rs of responsibility. There's content that warrants removal, because it contravenes the guidelines we have in place — and it's incumbent on us to keep adding and refining guidelines to reflect the misinformation trends we're seeing. We've got a bunch of guidelines around COVID content, and now around vaccine misinformation in general and various other health topics. That gives us a very objective, transparent basis to remove content from creators when it contravenes those guidelines, and that will always be important for these crowdsourced platforms.

Then there's the raising up of authoritative content, so you have a critical mass that's BBC-esque — coming from a truly authoritative source with enough checks and balances that it's likely to be credible, accurate and safe. In the UK, that's predominantly information from the NHS, and probably some other government authorities. That's the content we're working very hard to raise up — we're looking to launch our health shelves and channel labels later this year in the UK on that basis.

And then there's the reduce aspect, which is the greyer area — and I think some of what you're describing fits here. It's not specifically misinformation, it's just maybe lower-quality information, because there isn't evidence to back up the claim that a particular treatment is effective or a cure. A lot of homeopathic content we sometimes see talks about curing a disease, maybe at the risk of someone then not taking the more conventional medicine alongside it. There are lots of grey areas where we have to be really careful — we don't want to remove all of that just because it doesn't have evidence behind it, unless it's actually misinformation. So what we do is try to reduce it: we have various algorithms, and individuals and doctors within the organisation, who help determine the relative credibility, quality and accuracy of information, and therefore suppress lower-credibility information from surfacing as often in search results.

All the platforms will be having similar challenges and their own approaches. It's not easy, and you're right that once you move away from a world of the NHS and the BBC giving you your information, things get more difficult. But that's the world we live in. And if it wasn't on YouTube, it could just be in someone's day-to-day life — what's happening in Russia is an extreme example of how easy it is to create an environment where people hear one or two things that aren't the right things. So having a variety of voices is, I think, always the answer — but you need some oversight of that, which is what we're working hard at, and we're working very closely with the NHS to define what good-quality information looks like, how we raise up the right information, and how we reduce some of the lower-credibility information. As you get into a world of more choice and more access, things definitely get trickier.

There are two sides to this. One is how you find the right, or an interesting, role to go into; the other is how you then thrive in that role. On finding the right role: first, connecting with as many people as possible in organic ways, like we discussed, so you have an understanding of all the different things out there and can make a really informed choice about what to do next. And skewing towards something you think will be fun and impactful, as opposed to purely thinking about career goals and financial objectives — that's been really helpful for me. Because career success, growth and financial success will come over time if you pick roles you find fun, impactful, and are really willing to work hard on. To your earlier point about how hard you have to work — the more enjoyable the job, the harder you'll work, and you won't necessarily always think of it as work. That's the case for me in my current role: I'm more than happy to put in longer hours when I need to, and I'm not counting them up, because it's really interesting work and I can see the value it'll create for the wider world.

On how you then thrive in a role: being really strong at building relationships cross-functionally within an organisation is critical, because any really big initiative only succeeds if you have the full range of people backing it and willing to put in the work. Even if it's your team's initiative, whether it succeeds isn't really down to your team alone. That's probably something you do a bit less of as a clinician, because you're very much in your doctor bubble — you work a little with the multidisciplinary team, but you do your bit and hand off to everyone else. The second thing is building really good, strong collaborations and partnerships with the external world, and going deep on them: doing multiple things with the same partner, always creating value for them. That leads to some really exciting projects and, therefore, to success in your job. So those are some of the things I've picked up that I think are helpful as I move forward.