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Week 43: Services Week

Frankie RobertoPosted on

I look back on this week through a fog of sickness. I wasn’t ill enough to not be able to work, but ill enough to be avoiding the office and working from home surrounded by throat sweets and tissues. Somehow my symptoms seemed to track the weather, and so as we swing from crazily cold to pleasantly warm, I’m thankfully feeling a lot better.

This week was Services Week, an annual online event that brings together those working on public sector digital services.

I attended a few sessions, and hosted one.

A sea of secondary care

Mike Gallagher and Peter Ward from NHS England presented ‘The sea of secondary care’. This was a brilliant, honest appraisal of just how hard it is to deliver digital services within the NHS.

Secondary care, for those who aren’t aware (and I wasn’t 100% on this), comprises urgent and emergency care, planned and elective care, and mental health care. Primary care is GPs, pharmacies, dental and eyecare. How these terms for this split came about remains a mystery to me.

Mike pointed out that to most patients, their mental model of the NHS is their GP, and then everything else. Whereas the reality is that the ‘everything else’ is a mêlée of organisations comprising regions, integrated care boards (ICBs), trusts and a whole bunch of other organisations. And even GPs are grouped into primary care networks (PCNs).

In this landscape, data is scattered, local organisations do their own thing, and ‘policy levers’ are largely missing.

The NHS App team, via the ‘wayfinder’ project, has a strategy of hoovering up appointment data so that patients can view it all together in the app, and then handing over to localised patient engagement portals (PEPs) for more complicated interactions.

A bold strategy, and the team is still on a journey with it, but I wish it well.

Stop mapping, start doing

Ralph Hawkins and Sarah Fisher hosted ‘Stop mapping, start doing’. This could have alternatively been jokingly called ‘Confessions of a service designer’, as it was a chance to reflect on whether service maps are always worth the huge effort they take to produce.

Like many of those of those on the call, I can offer a mea culpa here, as I’ve been involved in a couple of high-fidelity map-all-the-things projects which seemed significant at the time, but produced artefacts which quickly dated and were never looked at again.

Sometimes the process itself might be valuable – maybe the real benefit of service mapping is the friends you make along the way? And other times being able to produce a ridiculously complicated map might help convince key stakeholders that the status quo is unsustainable. But there can also be times where the workshops and design activity to produce a map can end up being busywork.

Sarah also commented that she loves a memo over a map, and Ralph suggested that perhaps prose documents are easier to critique and collaborate on.

As Vicky Houghton-Price put it in 2023, Do you need another map? Probably not..

GOV·UK brand refresh

The Government Digital Service hosted a session about their upcoming brand refresh.

I no longer work on GOV.UK branded services, so this doesn’t affect me much, but the planned switch of the header from a black background to a blue background will make it much more visually similar to the NHS brand. Whether this is beneficial or potentially confusing, I’m not quite sure yet.

Prevention services show and tell

I hosted an open show and tell, featuring demos from 5 presenters of services and designs they’re currently working on.

It wasn’t the best attended, but I love this format. Multiple voices, work-in-progress, showing-the-thing, working in the open. The more we do this as an organisation, the better we get at it.

But perhaps next year I’ll need to promote it better, and maybe not do it on a Friday lunchtime.

  • Claim for a missing tooth from Matt Eason is a great fictional digtal government service which made me chuckle
  • Darren Jones speech to Institute for Government was refreshingly detailed and practical. I’d love to see what the ‘Oscar’ IT systems looks like.
  • FluSurvey is a project from UKSHA I stumbled across, where you can volunteer to give a weekly summary of whether you have flu symptoms. I’ve signed up, but I tend to only remember to do the survey when I’m feeling ill, which probably makes me a really bad participant.

Hoping this weekend will be a final bit of recovery, and then I’ll be back on form next week.