Week 59: Mobilisation
The highlight of this week was a trip to Leicester to visit some of the East Midlands pharmacies now offering the RSV vaccination. We did over 20,000 steps, spoke to six pharmacies, and had one very cheap lunch in a delightful cafe.
The purpose of our visits was to learn from the pharmacists how the process of getting set up for this new vaccination programme has been, whilst it was still fresh in their memories.
We heard that are a lot of steps involved, and half the pharmacies hadn’t yet completed them all so weren’t yet offering the vaccination.
Before they could begin, the pharmacies had to:
- sign a contract
- complete some training
- read and sign the patient group direction (PGD)
- get set up on a service for ordering the vaccine and order initial stock
- get set up on a different new service for opening appointment slots
- get set up on our service for recording vaccinations
- update another service to indicate on the NHS website they are open for walk-in appointments
- get set up on another service for being paid for them
- learn how to prepare the vaccine
These services are run by three different organisations (NHS England, UK Health Security Agency and NHS Business Services Authority) and use several different logins.
When you list all these steps out, it’s easy to understand how it might take some time to do them all. Pharmacies are busy places, and this vaccine is just one of many services they offer, so any stumbling blocks can cause delays.
Thankfully, the pharmacies did often have people they could rely on to make sense of all this and help them through the process. Sometimes this was the regional team at NHS England, other times it was a peer support WhatsApp group, or just someone at the pharmacy who was the most confident with digital stuff.
It’s a humbling reminder that there is no ‘Go’ button that can be pushed by a central NHS committee that will instantly start a vaccination programme. It requires a lot of people to do a lot of things.
I think we can improve all this.
Promoting prototyping
Mike and I published an NHS blog post this week: Why we are reinvesting in the NHS prototype kit.
In it, we set out why we believe that prototyping in code has some big advantages over visual layout tools like Figma, and how we’ve invested in improving the NHS prototype kit and the support and training for it.
Getting the post published was a bit of an ordeal, with a few different sign-off steps, but I’m glad we did it. Having it somewhere official means we can point suppliers and new joiners at it, and better set expectations for new teams.
I’m also hopeful that we’ll be able to continue to build a community of designers and researchers who can support each other with using the prototype kit, and continue to make improvements to it.
Links
- Doing open from Giles Turnbull
- Building the NHS’s digital backbone: The hidden tech that delivers vaccines from our Deputy Director Helena Powell
- Making services work together — starting with health, disability and work from Eleanor Stephens at the Government Digital Service
I’m now on holiday for 3 weeks, doing an epic interrail trip with my family. Out of office: On.