Week 60: Starting to shine
This was my first week back after a 3 week holiday, interrailing around Europe. Before having kids I’d only ever take a week off a time, but I now value having a proper long break and spending that time together as a family.
I mostly managed not to not think about work much, but I did experience a bunch of digital public services. The thing about travelling by train is that there’s a lot of logistics involved. Each country and city has its own train and metro services, with their own ticketing policies. There’s some limited interoperability, but I still ended up having to use a dozen different websites and install a whole phone screen’s worth of apps. It reminded me a bit of the sea of secondary care and the fragmented NHS digital landscape.
Despite the faff, being able to do so much digitally was very empowering, saving us lots of time and anxiety compared to having to deal with ticket offices and ticket machines in different languages and locations. Digital public services enabled us to explore far more of Europe than we would otherwise. I recommend it.
Product page
Whilst I was away, the new product page and sign up process for Record a vaccination went live.
This is something we’ve been working for a while – see week 46 and week 47) – and is a big step forward.
I wrote some design history posts to explain the background behind this: promoting the service with a product page and enabling pharmacies to sign up to the service.
In short, NHS pharmacies have a choice of which digital platform to use, and so we need to not just keep the lights on, shine bright, as Steve put it last month.
Having a product page and allowing organisations to self-onboard isn’t a new idea. We borrowed heavily from the pattern of platform services from the Government Digital Service: GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay, GOV.UK Forms and so on. But it is relatively new to the NHS. Our own NHS Notify service has a great product page (that we also borrowed from), but doesn’t yet have an online sign up process beyond a Microsoft form to register interest.
Since going live, we’ve had over 150 pharmacies sign up already, which is a promising start.
The product page also has a secondary purpose of more widely communicating what our products do and where they’re going. As Micol has put it, this is part of our building up the art of communication.
I hope this will be a pattern some of our other digital prevention services will be able to adopt in future, particularly as we consider a future of national platforms used by empowered local and regional NHS organisations.
Weeknotes
As Mike has noted, we now have a flotilla of designers who are regularly writing weeknotes, including our Head of Design Tero who has just started.
I read them all, and I find that they help contribute to a feeling of momentum and being part of a wider work community. But I get that it can be overwhelming, so please don’t feel the need to read everything I’ve written every week. I do these mainly for myself, to get thoughts and ideas out of my head, and so I’ve got notes to refer back to in future.
Last week of school summer holidays ahead. I think we’re all looking forward to getting some routine back.