Skip to main content

Week 14: Back to work

Frankie RobertoPosted on

I returned to work this week after a two-and-a-bit-week holiday, which was very refreshing (apart from the one little incident).

It was great to come back and see the progress our development team had made whilst I was away.

We continue to be super busy, preparing our service for the launch of the RSV vaccine on 1 September.

A news story went out this week highlighting that a study has shown the RSV vaccine could prevent 5,000 infant hospitalisations, which is a great reminder of the value of our work on the digital service to support this.

Demos, demos, demos

I did a demo of our service to some senior stakeholders, and helped answer questions in two demo sessions where a colleague demoed our service to over 150 future users.

In each of these, people were seeing the service for the first time, and the feedback was largely positive!

Of course, the real test is when users actually start using the service themselves, for real. But first impressions count for something too.

NHS Prototype Kit

I’ve been using the NHS Prototype Kit more and more.

Having prototypes that people can view in a browser is proving to be useful for demos (where navigating Figma can be fiddly), and for developers implementing designs.

I’ve also been trying to help others across the NHS get access to the prototype kit (and GitHub and Heroku) and doing a bit of teaching how it can be used.

We’ve just released a new version of the kit, which includes a change I made to the way that prototypes are password protected, which borrowed heavily from a similar change that the GOV.UK Prototype Kit made.

NHS App notifications

I received my first (I think) notification through the NHS App this week.

The notification just said ‘You have a new message’, and I had to open the app and sign in to see the actual message.

I can understand the security and privacy reasons for this, given how sensitive the message might be, however I’ll admit that seeing the vague notification message did induce a small bit of panic in me. (Which I imagine would be worse in some scenarios.)

Thankfully the message turned out to be entirely irrelevant, asking me to do something I was already doing.

I’m told though that viewing the notification within the app saves the NHS the cost of an SMS, so at least that’s some consolation.