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Week 68: The rule of 2 feet

Posted by
Frankie Roberto
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I went up to Leeds this week for the annual get-together of the extended senior leadership team (ESLT).

The day kicked off with a “future thinking” talk from Richard Pope, which sketched out some possible patterns and considerations for how we might bring digital prevention services together in future. Hopefully he’ll be writing it up as a blog post soon.

It was a great way to begin, and triggered some thoughts and ideas I had later on. Most of my design work is grounded in the practical realities of today, with the aim being to deliver value early, but it’s good to have the opportunity to think a little further ahead.

The bulk of the rest of the day was structured as a unconference. I introduced this, setting out the format, explaining the etiquette, and throwing out a few suggestions for possible session topics:

  • what rules should we stop following?
  • discoveries: what are they good for?
  • show and tell: things that have gone wrong and what we’ve learnt from them

I was pleased that nearly everyone pitched a session, although this did mean that Duncan and I had to quickly group them together and assemble a grid.

The first session I attended was about comms and content strategy, and in particular what next for the DPSP website. This is something I’ve been giving Giles a bit of help with. It serves a few different purposes, the most important of which is to help the rest of the NHS (and government, and others) understand what we’re up to.

The second session I went to asked the question: how can the NHS app be more person-centric? This started by discussing ways in which it currently isn’t. One issue is that the app will show you notes from a GP, or a discharge letter from a hospital, but these are often written for the benefit of other doctors rather than the patient themselves. Consequently they’re full of jargon and hard to interpret (the app links to a list of common abbreviations to try and mitigate this).

We can and should do the hard work to make this information more user-centric. However it did make me think of an idea which potentially adds some value in a different way: encouraging patients to write their own notes. For people with complex medical issues, keeping your own medical notes is often recommended as a way of remembering who you’ve seen and what they said. This could be something the app directly supports. Similarly, whilst the NHS app ought to be able to show you a list of all your appointments across all organisations, right now that isn’t a reality - so maybe it’d be helpful to let patients directly add any appointments not otherwise shown? In short: the app could be a more active read/write experience and not just passive read-only?

For the last unconference session slot, I joined a discussion about support and service management. The conversation got quite technical and a little tense, and I switched over to hear the second half of Mike’s session about the impact of the NHS app switching to more native code. I felt bad about bailing on it though, so I’ve tried to make amends by continuing the discussion about service support models on our internal Slack. Bringing support and product development closer together is something I care about.

The day ended with a session on leadership challenges. I felt a bit of a fraud in this, as unlike others there I’m embedded in a single product team and the majority of my time is spent doing design rather than supporting others. But regardless of this balance, there seemed some common challenges about how we support our teams, particularly given the various different contractual arrangements and employment statuses.

I left the day feeling energised, and grateful to being working with such a good bunch of people. It’s been a year since the first ESLT unconference, and a few of us reflected that a lot of the conversations have moved on since then, and there’s been a lot of progress.

I’ll leave the last word to Caroline though, who’s given us a provocation for next time:

For the next unconference, I’d like us to be bolder. Fewer questions (where we go round in circles) and more brave proposals, with rationale.

Nine. Nine is how many countries I managed to visit in my 5 day European rail trip last week. It was fun.