Week 80: The bull in the room

Posted by: Frankie Roberto
Published: 17 January 2026

Photo of me stood in front of a giant mechanical bull

I’m writing these notes on the way back from UK Gov Camp in Birmingham. It was great to catch up with people at the event, meet some new folk, and take part in some thoughtful sessions.

One of the more NHS-relevant discussions was about digital identity and verification. This meandered into talking about ‘proxy access’ too, with someone from the Department for Education saying that they’d like GOVUK One Login to be able to support parent or carer relationships. This is something that the NHS already has, although it’s not yet as widely used or as easy to set up as it should be.

Patient-centred-design

The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care gave a speech this week, Modernising the NHS to meet changing demands.

There were several mentions of both prevention and digital in it. My favourite bit though was this:

If public services are designed around the convenience of the institution, the result is silos, handouts, delays and poor performance. When those services don’t co-ordinate, the public pays twice: in money and in misery. If public services are designed around the citizen, the result should be joined up support, better impact and better value for money.

I’d like to see us put more detail on what patient-centred-not-organisation-design means though.

My starter-for-10:

services available at a time and place that suits patients
patients own their own health data, and can see it, correct it, and take it with them if they move to another country
medical notes written in language understandable by patients, not just for other clinicians
organisational boundaries are visible (for transparency) but highly permeable

Surveys, surveys, surveys

By co-incidence I received 2 survey invitations by post this week.

The first was from my GP, asking me about their services. The letter included this line, which amused me:

You can help to save the NHS money by taking part as soon as possible. That way we won’t have to send you any reminders.

I can’t see us using this language in vaccination invitations, but I wonder if it makes a difference for survey response rates!

The survey was mostly standard questions about the GP’s services and ease of booking. I presume it’s some kind of standardised thing they’re obliged to do, but I’ve not yet tracked down where any results are published.

The second letter asked me to take part in a new Community and Engagement Survey from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which offered a £10 incentive.

There were a lot of questions, and they veered somewhat between the boring (‘how many children in your household?’) to the personal (‘in general, how much do you trust people?’) to the existential (‘to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile?’).

There were also a ton of questions about distance from and engagement with local amenities and culture, which made me realise how much I genuinely love living in a London neighbourhood with so much on my doorstep.

I’ll be interested to see the analysis of this new survey. Whilst the topic was culture and community, I strong suspect that a lot of this correlates with the social determinants of health too.

Patient-centred-design

Surveys, surveys, surveys

Links