Week 56: 10 Year Plan
This Thursday saw the much anticipated release of the 10 Year Health Plan for England.
I’ve not read it properly yet, as I’ve been too busy with our 3 month plan, designing features and changes that will be needed for the next winter vaccination campaign starting in September. More of that in future updates.
But I did do a quick search for “vaccine”, and was pleased to see many of our current priorities mentioned, including a bigger role for community pharmacies, being able to see vaccine history in the NHS app and book appointments if not up to date, and being ready to support new vaccines being developed.
Plans to enable health visitors to administer vaccines to babies and children were also included, which might mean us having to make our digital systems work better on mobile devices where an internet connection is slow or non-existent. A great challenge.
There’s plenty more in the plan about prevention and digital besides just vaccination though, and I’ll take the time time properly read and digest it over the coming weeks and months.
Might even try and track down a printed copy for the office.
Show and tells
I attended two show and tells this week.
One from the personalised prevention teams that Ralph and Irina work with, and one from my five year old’s class at school who presented their design and technology hand puppet project.
They were both great, for the following reasons:
- talking about research they did
- being unafraid to show work in progress
- not having too many words on each slide
- explaining how they’d evaluate their work (for the five year olds this was by performing a puppet show to nursery children and gauging reaction: a true beta test)
These things aren’t always the case. I’ve sat through many a show and tell in the past filled with dense slide decks of impenetrable jargon, or that just show glossy static mockups of a potential digital service but not demo, or which just sing the praises of a team’s work but offer no useful lessons from the ideas that didn’t work.
Doing good show and tells is a real skill and sign of a good culture.
Not all of them end with an adorable singing rendition of “Five Little Monkeys” though.
Nova Scotia
As part of our series of Thoughtful Thursday talks, this week we heard from Natalie Oake and the Kainos team who’ve worked together to transform digital health care in Nova Scotia.
Many of their problems are only too familiar, but they explained how the combination of political will, new legislation and leadership not afraid to take risk have allowed change to happen, and rapidly.
Lots of the technical stuff presented was a little hard to understand, although I think it boiled down to basically piping data from a ton of different sources and systems into a single central place. This makes it sound easy, but they’ve had to grapple with the messy reality of dozens of data formats and messy data needing lots of clean up. AI helped, but this needed human intervention too.
The interesting stuff for me was what this has enabled, which is for citizens to have way more access to their own health data. And from multiple providers too (both public and private, as I understood it).
I asked whether there was much resistance to this, and how they dealt with concerns about patients seeing information not originally intended for them. The answer was illuminating.
Yes, there was lots of worry. Would it cause more anxiety amongst patients? Would it increase calls or visits to doctors? What if the data shown was wrong or inaccurate.
They dealt with these very pragmatically, by releasing incrementally, having clinicians involved in reviewing new data sets, and in some cases only letting patients see newly recorded information from a fixed data, and not the historic data.
But they also said that the fears proved unfounded, demand has not gone up, and they’ve seen the benefits of patients being more engaged and empowered with their own healthcare.
NHS design stuff
We’ve made a prerelease of version 10 of NHS frontend available for internal testing. This contains a mix of new features, design changes, and under-the-hood rewiring. Big thanks to Colin, Ananda, Paul and others for their work on this so far. Final stretch now. If you work on an NHS digital service, do test it out give us feedback if you have any issues (or not).
I’ve opened up sign ups for the NHS prototype kit training course we’re running in September, and we’ve had over 60 people wanting to attend already! A good sign, but we might need to add a few more dates.
Links
- The power, peril and privilege of working in the open from Matt Jukes (his talk from Camp Digital) - I try to practice working in the open too, but Matt has being doing it for ages and is far braver than I!
- James Higgott: June 2025 is a great example of the the weeknotes format: open and honest. His guess of 126 mentions of the app in the 10 year plan was a bit off, but it was discussed a LOT.
- I will tell everyone that you are the people who will fix digital from colleague Veronika Jermolina is an account of the work to improve the paper processes involved in the national breast screening programme.
- The Power of Contextual Inquiry: Lessons from the Frontlines of Digital Transformation in Healthcare from colleague Sakshi Lamba Jhanji describes the value of going deep when doing research.
Two weeks left of school for my kids, and their energy levels are already drained. We’re all counting the days to our summer holiday.