Week 44: Principles
We had an extended senior leadership team (ESLT) get-together in Leeds in this week. As with our previous event, it was a great opportunity to catch up with others from the wider programme.
There was lots of thoughtful conversation about how the merger with the Department for Health and Social Care may affect us, both in the need to support people in a time of uncertainty, and the opportunities that the merger may present us in future.
Principles
One of the sessions at the get-together, led by Richard Pope and product coach Sian Huynh, was focused on whether we needed some specific design principles for digital prevention services.
This was posed as a question, as there are already NHS design principles, Government design principles, and some principles in the NHS constitution. Could there be some value in having some others that are more specific to prevention services?
In the end, I’m not sure we answered the question posed at all, but it did prompt a bit of debate on the extent to which we meet the existing design principles.
Personally, I wonder whether principles ought to be emergent rather than decided up front. A way of communicating and amplifying existing culture and practices rather than than an ambition to aim for. But perhaps they can be a bit of both.
Co-incidentally, Nick Kimber has today posted a set of 13 Test, Learn and Grow principles from a cross-government group. I particularly like “Networks, not hierarchies” and “Relationships, not transactions”.
This quote in particular feels like a great ambition for NHS services to aim for, and speaks to the delicate balance between a strong digital centre and increased local devolution:
We don’t like silos. We mix policy and delivery, local and national, operational and digital.
Recent work
We’ve written up some of our recent work over the past couple of months as design history entries.
- Asking fewer, better questions
- Improving how we ask users for feedback
- Notifying users about updates
Our current focus is looking at how we might integration vaccination appointments, as well as improving the way that organisations ‘onboard’ and ‘offboard’ from the service.
Links
- The UK government’s digital blueprint focuses too much on websites and apps, and not enough on public services from Peter Wells
- Big Automated Government in a Time of Austerity from Rachel Coldicutt
- Abbreviations for digital prevention service - a page I’ve added to our service catalogue to help keep track of all the acronyms
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums out there.