Week 11: Change
A change of focus for our team this week, as we’ve wrapped up our pilot and are now focused on preparing for the upcoming winter vaccination campaign.
We’ve also changed from using Trello to Jira (don’t ask) and are trying a different, more collaborative approach to writing ‘cards’ for the backlog.
There’s some other changes to our ways of working too, which will hopefully mean that design and development can work together much more closely.
Cervical screening
In the office on Tuesday there were some celebrations for the launch for the new NHS Cervical Screening Management System (CSMS).
As part of this there was great presentation on the history of the cervical screening programme, from the work of scientist Georgios Papanikolaou and his wife Andromachi Papanikolaou through to the launch of the national screening programme in 1964 and the various IT systems to support it.
There’s been lots of change along the way, and no doubt more still to come, but it’s always great to see an organisation acknowledging its history too.
Functional specifications
I’ve spent some time this week trying to understand some of the data we collect, in order to try and best design the interface to ask for it.
These data fields and the options are listed in functional specifications – which are themselves changing – but the the documents often don’t specify how or what the data is used for.
Digging into these questions is often a big part of designing services.
Links
Read this week:
- What really happened to GOV.UK Registers by David Durant
- Practices take urgent collective action to switch off GP Connect update from Pulse
- Statement from the [new] Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
School fair this weekend. Hoping for better weather than last year!