Meeting a Colonel at London’s RAF club
Last week I had a really interesting meeting with Colonel Glynn Evans at the RAF club on Piccadilly. It’s a fascinating building steeped in history, with lots of beautiful stained glass (and of course, many pictures of airplanes).
I quickly learnt that in some ways, Colonel Glynn is like a cat- in that he has certainly needed all of his nine lives- he has had a lot of close calls over the years. He spent a number of years in the army as an anaesthetist, and served in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan among other regions. At times he was both a Colonel and a Consultant Anaesthetist, which basically means you did what he said.
Glynn’s first trip was to Northern Ireland in 1995, and he was the first anaesthetist over the border into Iraq in 2003. He told me that one night, when in Iraq in 2007, a missile landed in the corridor just feet from his bedroom when he was sleeping. It went around 7 meters underground and there was an almighty bang, but luckily for Glynn, the fuse had been added incorrectly, and it didn’t detonate. This mishap probably saved his life. He continued to sleep in the room just near the missile. “Don’t worry” he was reassured. “If it goes off now, it’s so deep underground that it won’t hurt you”.
The Colonel and his team often had to operate when the building they were in was being mortared, whilst wearing body armour and a helmet. This photo was taken on one of those occasions, in Iraq in 2007.
After all his trips, Glynn has lived to tell the tale, and has doubtless saved many lives over the years. He’s also received a number of medals, which you can see here.
Glynn has a huge wealth of knowledge and experience- over 5 years of medical school at Cambridge university, training as a junior doctor and beyond in the NHS, and then all of his army training and experience. As you can imagine, he has a lot to teach others. He has delivered a lot of training, teaching military personnel here and overseas. He spent 2 weeks in Sri Lanka, teaching the local military about Battlefield Advanced Trauma Life Support (known as BATLS), and has been on trips to Denmark and South Africa.
Colonel Evans on a non-ops training trip in Denmark
On a training trip to South Africa, with the surgeon general
So what does any of this have to do with us at Ctrl O?
Well, the Ministry of Defence has British Military personnel around much of the world, doing non-operational activity like Glynn has done - such as training. (Non-ops are non- military operations). Also, military personnel from other countries often come to the UK for non-ops purposes too. This is all known as International Defence Engagement, and is part of a national strategy to build relationships around the world and share information. “The military often has it’s own language” Glynn tells me, “and we need to make sure we’re all communicating in the same way, and doing things in the same way- singing from the same hymn sheet basically”.
This International Defence Engagement can be vital work. Between June 2022 and November 2023, 30,000 ordinary Ukrainian men and women trained to become soldiers on British soil, in the largest military training programme here since world war 2.
All of the information about which British non-ops personnel are overseas and when, and which overseas military personnel are here on non-ops, is stored at the Ministry of Defence in LinkSpace, a software that we’ve created at Ctrl O.
In LinkSpace, it’s data that’s really well protected and secure. And at any one time, the MOD can get a huge amount of information at the touch of the button.
Glynn is now working solely in the NHS, and during our chat last week, agreed that LinkSpace could work well in the hospital he’s at. “We know just where the patients are- they’re in their beds- but it’s the doctors we can’t keep an eye on- they’re always moving around and changing departments!” He thinks that keeping information centrally about which doctor was where, in which department, would be very useful indeed- and especially when a large bunch of junior doctors arrives.
If you’re in a company that could benefit from getting the LinkSpace treatment, do get in touch for a friendly no-pressure chat!
Ctrl O is a registered supplier on Digital Marketplace and is ISO27001 certified (Information Security Management).
Ctrl O was also the winner of the Outstanding Success Story category at the last annual EuroCloud Awards.
