Week 32: NHS wrapped 2024
It’s my last working day of 2024, so I thought I’d do a bit of looking back on the year.
Since starting back in April, I’ve learnt a ton about design and digital in the NHS.
The team I joined has launched a brand new service, first with a local pilot back in June and then England-wide to support the RSV vaccine launch in September. It’s been quite a journey.
I still have plenty of gaps in my knowledge of how all the systems and services work together, but things are becoming clearer. I and others have been trying to piece together the bigger picture, and we’ll keep investigating. Hopefully next year we can do more work to bring related teams closer together.
I’m excited to work somewhere where 2 of the core value are “be bold” and “work in the open”.
People
A big shout out to everyone who’s welcomed me into the NHS this year, answering my endless questions, and collaborating on the work (increasingly in-person, which has been great!).
Outside of my immediate product team, I’ve also enjoyed talking and working with other teams, including others in digital prevention services, as well as the app team, the website team and the service manual team. Organisations are webs not hierarchies.
Thanks too to our senior leadership team (many of who say they read these notes - hi!) who are enabling the changes towards more digital ways of working and building services. Let’s test and learn.
Finally, I keep a list of other weeknoters on the homepage of this site, and I read all of those every week. If you’ve not seen the list, take a look and check them out.
If you work with me in the NHS and don’t yet publish weeknotes but are considering it, give it a try! I’ve found it a helpful exercise and not too much of a burden. They only have to be notes, not an essay. Doing weeknotes by Giles Turnbull is the canonical guide. If you’d like a hand setting something up, let me know.
Stats
- I am in 68 Slack channels. Probably too many.
- I have 4 NHS Microsoft accounts
- I received 1,895 emails (353 unread)
- I went on 4 trips to the Leeds office - enough to now have a favourite coffee shop near the station
- I visited 3 NHS trusts, 2 maternity units and 9 pharmacies for user research
- I made 44 commits to NHS frontend and 43 commits to the NHS prototype kit
- I designed 2 mission patches
- I wrote 32 weeknotes with no gaps, a personal record. Hope some of them were interesting. Let me know.
Next year
There’s lots of plans for next year, and our roadmap is simultaneously exciting and scary.
But for now it’s out-of-office: on.
Digital prevention services stickers in the header by Ralph Hawkins.