How we did a Kettering General Hospital Public Board meeting using Teams Live Event

I thought I’d write up our experience (a) for others but (b) for the next time when I’ve forgotten exactly how we did it (and this is a companion to an earlier post I wrote about doing a YouTube live show & tell).

I imagine most Teams Live Events are much nearer to a TV or YouTube ‘broadcast’ — i.e. 1 person, or a few — broadcasting to many. And to manage bandwidth, and how many people might be trying to speak — only the ‘broadcaster’ can be heard, and questions are submitted beforehand or via moderated ‘typed’ questions on the day.

That would be easy…

Our requirement

We needed to have all Board members being able to see and hear each other (20 plus people) but also allow members of the public to ‘attend’. In Teams Live Event this means the Board members would be ‘Presenters’ and the public would be ‘Attendees’ — able to hear everyone, but only see the person with the ‘camera’ on them (a Presenter selected and sent to live).

In normal circumstances Attendees would be able to ask questions by typing them in, and a moderator would choose which questions would be seen by the whole group, and potentially answered.

The 'Producer' would be able to see all Presenters, select who the camera was on, moderate any Q&As and generally act as a TV Producer.

How we did it

• We needed the ability for 20+ people to be full participants as Board members — this means having a NHS.NET email address — but also allowing for an almost unlimited number of people to join who might not have a NHS email (i.e. as guests). By unlimited I mean 10,000…
• We could have done a normal Teams event, but (a) this is limited to 250 people and (b) we needed some controls over who could speak and when. The Board is a formal part of our governance and has protocols to follow.
• We also wanted to test Teams Live Events out as we’re suckers for punishment.
• A week in advance of the meeting we created the Teams Live Event in the Teams calendar and sent this out to all participants. As part of this we gave this guidance

Board members will need to log-in to the Teams ‘app’ with their .NET account (e.g. john.smith@nhs.net) and this will make you a full member able to speak and be heard. If you haven’t already you can download it at https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/download-app. If you login as Guest via the web this will make you an observer and not be able to speak or be heard.

The Chair will introduce agenda items and manage questions in the usual way.

All Board members will be able to see and hear each other on Teams, and this ‘live event’ is very similar to any Teams meeting — the main difference being the person with the ‘camera’ on them will have a red outline around their image.

Any public viewers will only see one speaker — controlled by our Producer colleague from IT — but will be able to hear all Board members speak

Where there is a person presenting slides, that person should have any presentations lined up to ‘share’ via Teams. All participants and observers will be able to see these slides

The Chair will invite Board members to speak/ask questions by stating their name and pausing, before asking the question/stating a comment.

The ‘camera’ will remain on the presenter of any paper, for members of the audience.

• There was one crucial bit of guidance we omitted from the above, in part as we didn’t know it at the time (more later, it’s about iPads)…
• We generated the link for public attendees to join, and we publicised this in our social media channels
• I’d already decided we should be ‘near to the action’ on the day of the broadcast. Whilst all participants were remote some of the crucial ones (Head of Governance, COO, Director of Finance, Director of Nursing, Medical Director) would be down one corridor. So we grabbed our CEO’s office with a big table (so we could be socially distant) and a big screen (so we could have many Producer eyes on what was happening)
• We had one Producer (Nathan), myself as backup Producer, and Riner and Matthew to firefight (so glad they were there)
• We were established at least an hour before the event, because for many people this would be the first time using Live Event, and logging in in this way
• This meant anyone having issues logging in, or with headsets (surprising how often that happens), could let us know and we could walk them through the issues
• We made sure our machines were plugged into the mains, and the main Producer laptop was plugged into an ethernet cable, not on Wifi, and connected to the large screen
• We didn’t (but we will next time) make sure the power settings on the laptop would be to ‘never power down’, or put the screen to sleep on mains power
• We also made sure Windows was up to date, we didn’t want any unwarranted reboots
• We had the Producer’s screen projected to the big screen on the wall so we could all point out things, I joined as a Presenter on one laptop (so I could experience what the Board was experiencing) and on another laptop I joined as an Attendee (so I could see what the public saw)
• Before we went live we had 4 or five people with issues logging in. It was bizarre as they had a green tick in Teams, we could talk to them, but we couldn’t get them into the call. As it turns out they were trying to join by iPad — which seems to be an issue for Live Events — see various forum posts here and here . Maybe we should have tested this, but hey people have been using ‘normal Teams’ on iOS devices fine. So, in future, test test, test
• So, a big plus to having knowledgeable people on hand 30 mins before the meeting to answer any tech calls
• As part of the Board we had 2 people sharing presentations. We’d rehearsed how to do this and we did the split screen where the presentation took up 75% of the screen, and the ‘talking head' 25%
• We showed a YouTube video from an ITV news item when they visited the hospital on the 24th April. It’s quite a powerful video. This was a little fiddly as the Producer showed this and had to remember to share the screen and make sure the Live Broadcast continued
• We also made sure we ticked the ‘Enable System Audio’ box so the sound that would normally just be going through the headset, actually went out to Teams
• It emerged in the meeting that the Producer could only select from the ‘last 9 Presenters’ to put their camera on. This meant if there were more than 9 people with cameras on, but the person the Presenter was wanting to select wasnt one of the ‘last 9’, they couldn’t be selected and made live. This was a serious issue and we had to ask people to turn their cameras off if they werent speaking.
• As part of our setup we hadn’t enabled recording the session, but if you do record bear in mind that content will be FOI-able
• And conversely, if you don’t record, be aware Attendees could record the event on another device, and they would have a verbatim record of the meeting and you wouldn’t!
• As we didn’t record the event we didn’t have the fun of downloading the replay from Streams, but we’ve done it before and it’s pretty easy — mindful it takes a while for the file to be processed, and then to download
• We didn’t enable the Q&A function this time — in part as we were feeling our way. We’ll use it in some upcoming events but it looks simple enough — anyone can pose a question — and the Presenters (or the Producer) has the ability to moderate what questions are asked and shared to the whole group

At the end of the day it was a success, we had a good Board meeting, in the end all Board members could join, and we had between 30 and 40 public attendees which is more than would attend a ‘face to face board’.

What next

Well we’re going to do a couple more test events, to check:

• If when there’s only one Producer and the Producer’s machine goes down what happens? Does the event still continue in the cloud or does it stop?
• How does having two Producer’s work (insuring against the above)?
• Is that pesky iPad issue as we suspect i.e. even if you’re logged into Teams with your NHS.NET account you cannot attend a Live Event as Presenter
• And if so, does it work fine on Android devices, or is it laptops only from now on for all Presenters

And we’re going to use Live Event for a Digital Ambassadors event on the 16th June, and an all-Digital Portfolio event on the 8th. And it wouldn’t surprise me if we soon do a ‘cross KGH and NGH’ event to potentially 11,000 staff 😉

We like a challenge at KGH…