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As a medical student, you get used to “first day nerves” happening every few weeks. New rotation. New location. New teams, new tensions. This time round, I started a three-week internship at Kaleidoscope under the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management.

With apologies for the unsubtle metaphor (for which you can blame mother nature!) - we arrived in Bristol, for the first of our shared learning series with the British Red Cross and Co-op partnership on tackling loneliness, in deep fog. We left in glorious sunshine.

Though the terraces were empty, 'You'll never walk alone' played in my mind throughout our recent Prevention Concordat learning event at Anfield Road. It seemed a fitting accompaniment to our conversations, which addressed some suitably grand topics about the role of community and place in promoting positive mental health.

How often do you have, in one place at one time, geographies as diverse as Sussex, Swindon and Southwark? Or organisations from the fire service to the Samaritans? Or professions, from politician to medic to manager?

Don't you just love going to an event in the basement of an identikit hotel? The beauty of the unrelenting artificial light. The delight of a day's worth of slides ("don't know why I kept this slide in here, you probably can't see it") in store. The gorgeous feeling that even if you haven't been here physically before, mentally you have many, many times. No, thought not. Does it have to be this way?

Home of Tolkien, more canals than Venice; Birmingham is a remarkable place. Among much else, Birmingham gave the world the blueprint for how local authorities could act with muscle to improve the health of its population.

By 8pm in most departments in most UK hospitals, the majority of people whose title implies a leadership or management role are on their way home, returning the following morning at, let’s say, 8am plus or minus one hour. ​Does this imply that for around half the average day, our great NHS hospitals are ‘un-led’?

Our systems and institutions are not strong enough to support the level of debate and discussion we need to make resilient policy. If we stopped to think about what we were doing critically, would we change course so often? Maybe we would be more likely to uncover what we don’t know.

"My first NHS job was in Plymouth," said Michael. "1980. My accommodation was on the site of the psychiatric hospital. Largely full of people with dementia, and barely a foot between their beds." If there’s ever an example of how major change does happen in health and care, the end of the Victorian asylum is it.

At Kaleidoscope we like webinars – while never being able to supplant the wonder of a face-to-face event, they’re a worthy complement. So why do webinars, digital discussions, online seminars, or whatever you want to call them often get such a bad reputation? In part we think it’s because they’re often misunderstood, or feared for reasons which turn out not to be true (or at least not as true as some make out).