Week 20: Pharmacy vaccinations
The biggest news for us this week was that it is now possible for 75 to 79 year olds to book an RSV vaccination at a pharmacy.
It is currently restricted to the East of England only, as this is the first time that our Record a vaccination service is being used by pharmacists.
One of our big questions is how the differences between healthcare settings might affect how staff members use the service. Already we’ve had a few stumbling blocks over things like email addresses, so we’ll keeping a watchful eye. Hopefully I’ll be able to go and visit some pharmacies in-person.
First production code pull request
After being helped to run our production code last week, this week I’ve dipped a toe in the water by opening my first ‘pull request’.
It’s a really tiny change, adding a missing HTML tag which is causing one of our pages to be mis-aligned by a dozen or so pixels.
Along with the other designers, we’ve compiled a list of small design and content tweaks like this, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to do at least some of them myself. The rest might require a quick pairing session with a developer.
Being a service manual research participant
I took part in a user research session as a participant for the NHS service manual team this week. It’s always interesting to sit on the other side of the one-way-mirror occasionally (well ok this was a Teams call).
The service manual team used the session to test how their new guidance on headings and titles. I was familiar with some of this, but not all of it.
It sounds like a simple topic, but there’s a lot of complexity in how heading tags combine with font sizes, and how heading tags in HTML (<h1>, <h2> etc) work alongside other heading-like features such as fieldset legends and table captions.
Like many a user research participant, I found myself apologising when getting lost and not spotting text that was there on the page all along.
Pagination arrows
I’ve been continuing to work on a new variant of the pagination component, and now have this working in a prototype.
It’s been bumped up in priority slightly as one of our organisations has already hit 172 items on a page which doesn’t yet have pagination.
Paul has proposed that the existing arrows could be made more consistent, which is a good suggestion.
Amusingly, the day after this I also noticed that the arrows aren’t consistent on some of our internal signage either:
School flu immunisations
I got an SMS from my kids’ school inviting me to consent to them receiving their annual flu immunisation.
These vaccines, I now know, are administered by school age immunisation services (SAIS) which are locally commissioned.
The SMS contained a link using tinyurl, which isn’t great, and the parent consent form is probably a bit longer than it needs to be – I had to first search for the school and then enter all the details for my children and me.
But having the vaccine (a nasal spray) in school is definitely convenient.
Links
- That Message From Your Doctor? It May Have Been Drafted by A.I. from the New York Times is US-focused but interesting
- How government defines a service from Central Digital and Data Office. As a linguistics graduate, I’m not a fan of definitions (real life is fuzzy), but good luck!
I enjoyed having beers after work with NHS pals this week. Office life!