Week 34: A tribute
This week I’d like to pay tribute to fellow designer Vicky Teinaki, a friend and colleague at the NHS, who has sadly passed away.
I met Vicky through the community of UK government digital folk, initially online and then at the various conferences and meet ups. Vicky was an incredibly active member of the community, and always there to give people support, take part in conversations, and be amazingly helpful.
We were both very involved with the GOV.UK Design System community, where she was a volunteer on the working group, and gave me and others tons of feedback and suggestions on our contributions.
Her weeknotes were legendary, filled with raw honesty and dense with interesting links. They were a big inspiration behind me starting these weeknotes when I joined the NHS. She would kindly review my notes each week, pointing out where I’d made typos or said something daft.
After several years of talking with Vicky, I was thrilled when she came to the NHS to join us in digital prevention services back in October - finally we’d get to work together.
Whilst we were on separate teams, Vicky was soon getting involved with many of the cross-team projects here – or ‘side quests’ as she aptly called them.
We worked together on the new NHS prototype kit website, where she created tons of new guidance and helped organise us in prioritising the work.
She also collaborated on a directory of digital prevention services, and somehow continually kept sniffing out relevant existing services we didn’t know about. Her research skills were astounding.
More than that, she was an amazing, supportive friend and colleague. Navigating big established organisations like the NHS isn’t easy, but Vicky was immediately part of the team, and helped us feel like we could all make progress together.
Vicky - you will be sorely missed. 💙
You can read memories and tributes of Vicky online, and leave your own.