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Biography
Katya Tambe is the Joint Head of Service (HoS) for the ophthalmology department at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH). She was appointed as a consultant ophthalmologist with a specialist interest in adult and paediatric oculoplastics in 2010.
Following her ophthalmic surgical training from the BJ Medical College in Pune, India and the West Midlands Deanery Birmingham, she went on to complete two prestigious oculoplastics fellowships at Leicester (2007–2008) and Moorfields Eye Hospital (2009–2010), in addition to a Paediatric Oculoplastics Fellowship at the Birmingham Children's Hospital in 2009.
She is the governance lead for paediatric ophthalmology at the Queen’s Medical Centre and chairs the ophthalmic division of the League of Friends Charity at NUH. The COVID-19 pandemic has come as a challenge in her third year as the Joint HoS.
What are the key leadership messages you want to get out to the BMJ Leader readership?
From my personal experience through this COVID-19 crisis, my message is fourfold.
Communication is paramount. I know that effective communication is a cliché and everyone always talks about it, but at the start of the pandemic, we were in a state of flux with a flurry of new guidance and decisions emerging on a daily basis. We initially established a Monday morning management meeting to consolidate the emerging guidance and send out a clear, coherent message. This quickly evolved to become a daily meeting with social distancing measures, and we extended the invitation to the entire department via Microsoft Teams to maintain transparency, giving everyone the opportunity to contribute directly.
The second point, especially in a crisis, is to be supportive. It is natural for staff to be frightened, particularly in the early days when no one knew what the virus was about, but being there for each other and reassuring staff that we are all in this together brought people together.
Third, it is important to be fair and equitable. Initially, there was concern among our allied health professional (AHP) staff …