Week 79: Vaccines that come to you
Welcome back after the winter break. I enjoyed 4 days of heavy snow in the Netherlands with the kids, and then only just made our train home.
A short week for me with not much I can report, so let’s cover some recent health and prevention news instead.
Health visitor vaccinations
A pilot project to trial having health visitors offer childhood vaccinations has been announced, and will take place across 2026.
The pilots will focus on trying to reach families who face difficulties getting vaccinations at a GP, whether that be through travel costs, language barriers, or other circumstances, as well as those that might be hesitant.
As well as testing whether this approach will increase uptake (and I hope it will), it’ll also be a test of the logistics of having health visitors take vaccines to families, and administering and recording the vaccinations in people’s homes.
For NHS Record a vaccination, we may have to consider issues such as connectivity and making sure the service works well on the devices used by health visitors (mobile? tablet? laptops?). Our service is intended to be ‘setting-agnostic’, but there are sometimes differences in setting that are worth accommodating: the design should be user-centred rather than user-agnostic. But there are trade-offs here so it’s a delicate balance.
NHS online hospital
This concept became a little more concrete with the announcement that it will cover 9 common conditions as an online service. The conditions are:
- cataracts
- glaucoma
- macular degeneration
- menopause symptoms
- menstrual problems
- prostate enlargement
- raised prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels
- iron deficiency anaemia
- inflammatory bowel disease
There’s a deadline too: the first patients are expected in 2027.
Of course, announcing it and delivering it are two very different things. There will no doubt be lots of interesting and tricky design problems to solve, which I hope we’ll all be able to learn from. There’s also the likely organisational and finance/accounting conundrums to work through, given this is an England-wide service which to some extent will replace locally-commissioned services.
I still think it’s a terrible name, but hopefully that’ll be an internal-only term.
Road death prevention
Away from the NHS, but still relevant to prevention, the Department for Transport announced a new Road Safety Strategy.
Outside of work, I’m an occasional active travel campaigner (I got 90m of new cycle lane built in my local area), and so I was pleased to see the strategy published.
The strategy contains a bunch of good stuff, such as lowering drink-driving limits, better driver training, and improving the design of both roads and vehicles. It also promises a Road Safety Investigation Branch who will investigate trends and use a test-and-learn approach to produce actionable recommendations.
Improving road safety doesn’t just help to prevent deaths and serious injuries from road collisions (which remain shockingly high), but encouraging more active travel through safer infrastructure helps prevent poor health from inactivity too. A double win.
Remembering Vicky
It’s been a year since we lost Vicky Teinaki. I’ve missed her greatly over the past year. Many of the projects I’ve worked on she would have been helping and cheerleading. I’m still stumbling across her blog posts and comments in GitHub issues and pull requests. Such a sad loss.
Links
New posts from NHS folk:
- Lessons learned after 7 months at NHSE from Liz Lutgendorff
- Why good teams should embrace tension from Vero Jermolina
- Assessing our work and approach from Mike Gallagher (who promises some design history posts on the native NHS app work!)
I’ll be at UK Gov Camp in Birmingham next weekend. If you’re going too, please say hello!