TY - JOUR T1 - Clinical specialists as digital leaders JF - Future Healthcare Journal JO - Future Healthc J SP - 196 LP - 198 DO - 10.7861/fhj.dig-2020-lead VL - 7 IS - 3 AU - Helen Parrott Y1 - 2020/10/01 UR - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/7/3/196.abstract N2 - KEYWORDSLooking back, physiotherapy for me was an obvious career choice. I had always wanted to understand how to help others use what they had in body and mind to achieve their goals. Early in my NHS career I found a preference for working with people with long-term conditions and came to learn that you had to understand the person before you can understand the health-related behaviour. When I started a post on an adult cystic fibrosis unit, it felt like I had found my place in the NHS. Cystic fibrosis (CF) is such an individual condition that, even with the same genetic mutations, no two people will have exactly the same experience of living with CF. As a CF physiotherapist, while you can never fully understand, you have to get as close as you can to that person's experience in order to find treatments, options and solutions that will work for that individual. I learnt that despite the scientific rationale behind the treatment, if it doesn't fit the individual, you find another one, trial it, evaluate your findings and if it fails, you dust yourself off together and you try something new. My role was a mix of trainer, coach, negotiator, motivator and experimenter, and I loved it.Life expectancy and quality of life for people with CF has significantly improved over the last 10 years, however, this brings the challenge of providing excellent quality and responsive healthcare with growing patient numbers and expectations.1 During this time, healthcare teams had been urged to consider providing telehealth as an option for routine monitoring in CF with benefits recognised both to the patient experience and in allocating hospital resources.2 As a CF physiotherapist, this gave me a deep sense of purpose. And I felt a duty to fully understand this … ER -