My friend Sophie is on a Back to Nursing course. It’s horrible, on many levels. “It’s almost like you have to lower your expectations to fit in, which I suspect is what the patients do every day. Isn’t that terrible?”

It was a real privilege to join West Essex Clinical Commissioning Group’s Board awayday this week, to which I’d been invited to bring a provocation around patient/citizen insight and ethnography. Whilst the brief family stories I shared on film and with quotes/photos were not primarily focused on health-related themes, CCG Board members needed no encouragement to grasp the implications for integrated commissioning of health and social care.