Week 57: Progress
This week was a short week for me, as I took Thursday and Friday off for a long weekend of hiking in the Lake District. I’m writing these notes on the train back, with sore legs and the satisfaction of having walked up some big fells in glorious sunshine.
Before all that though we had a big NHS Digital prevention services get together in Leeds. These events are held every 6 months, and I find them both tiring and energising. They are a reminder of the bigger picture of what we’re aiming to achieve and a celebration of the progress made so far. They’re also a chance to bump into colleagues beyond your immediate product teams and meet people in person who you’ve only previously spoken to remotely.
10 year vision
The recently published 10 year plan was much referenced, with both digital and prevention being at the heart of it. Lots of the things mentioned in it, such as being able to see vaccination history and book missing jabs from NHS app, or the introduction of at-home HPV testing, were thankfully well known to us and projects are already underway. There were a few surprises though.
It was pointed out that in many ways the 10 year plan is more of a vision than a plan. This is good, in that it’s important and useful to have a vision, but it means that it’s up to us to actually turn the vision into a deliverable plan.
Lessons from Barnsley
Our guest speaker for the event was Sarah Norman, the Chief Exec of Barnsley Council. The most interesting bit of her talk for me was about ‘health on the high street’, their initiative to move some NHS diagnostic services from hospitals to a dedicated building in the town centre.
This tickled both my NHS and urban planning interests, as Sarah explained how the project was part of a wider plan to increase footfall and activity in the town centre.
The project has already been a success and the team are expanding into a shopping centre. As Sarah explained it, both patients and the staff have appreciated the new location away from the hospital. For staff it means easier parking and better places to go on a lunch break, and for patients it means being able to combine a health appointment with shopping, or ‘rewarding themselves for attending by getting coffee and a cake after’.
As I’ve previously mentioned, I find hospitals to be weird, airport-like liminal spaces, so the strategy of moving some services closer to where people already are seems like a winner to me.
Demoing digital services
The afternoon of the event gave us a chance to see demos and talks from 5 of the product teams.
I enjoyed a demonstration of the Manage breast screening service which used role play and a flip-board to show both how the current paper-based process works, and how the alpha designs for the new digital service could work. It’s a huge challenge, as the appointments are short and paper can be fast and flexible (but also poses large financial and logistical costs) - so the digital service needs to be as fast or faster. We have similar challenges with Record a vaccination, and so I made a mental note that our teams should start swapping notes and stories from research more often.
Links
- Week 0: To start or not to start from Micol Artom, our Lead User Research for vaccination digital services, who has joined us in the weeknotes club
- Review of patient safety across the health and care landscape from Penny Dash is a new independent review. I’ve not read it all yet, but it contains a focus on patient experience which sounds promising.
- When to start small and do it for real is a post on a new blog from Richard Pope about when to start by doing it for real, as opposed to relying on user research using prototypes and mockups.
- How to save bureaucracy from itself from James Plunkett contains 7 practical ideas for fixing the system from within
- Leading the shift from analogue to digital: the art of the possible is a new podcast episode featuring Tom Loosemore talking about levers to push the digital agenda forward.
- The tangled undergrowth of complexity from Liz Lutgendorff is a great account of the unfathomable complexity of working in the NHS
Hope you’ve all endured the heatwave ok. My tactic this weekend was to pour water on my head at regular intervals.