Week 94: Chasing cars
This week started with a 5:30am alarm for an early train to Leeds, where I ran another session of the NHS prototype kit training course. It was our 8th time running it, and I no longer need to do any prep (other than remembering some print-outs), but it’s a long and tiring day.
Totally worth it though, to see the excitement when participants realise that they can actually make things that actually work.
There have been 74 people who’ve now completed the course, and there’s another 80 or so on the waiting list. Over the next few months I plan to think about ways to make it more scalable and sustainable.
Admin
Our talk for Thoughtful Thursday this week was from Julia Cream and Dan Wellings from The King’s Fund, titled ‘Lost in the system: patient experience of admin’.
In this context, ‘admin’ means all of the logistical and organisational stuff that happens around the actual healthcare being given: everything from sorting out an appointment, understanding what’s happening with a referral, seeing test results, collecting medication, and so on and on.
The polling research commissioned by The King’s Fund showed that patient perception of how the NHS handles this admin is poor, and getting worse.
The impact of this is high, with 45% of people in their survey saying their poor experience of NHS admin had made them give up seeking care or treatment.
Fixing this isn’t easy, but they had some recommended actions, including steps to recognise the importance of admin by measuring patient feedback on it, and setting out expectations in guidance.
One of their priorities which caught my eye though was to design and deliver two-way communications.
This is a bugbear of mine too. The most prominent feature of the NHS App is a ‘Messages’ section which has all the trappings of an email or messaging app, including read/unread status, sender names, filters, flagged and removed messages, and so on. Except for one: you cannot reply to anything or start your own message. It looks like email, but behaves like broadcast.
There’s reasons for this, of course, but I’d love to help think through the problems and design some genuine two-way communication channels for patients.
Keeping things open
NHS England was in the news this week over plans to withdraw software from public view over AI hacking fears. There are blog posts and an open letter rallying against it.
I can’t speak to the security threat that AI tools like ‘Mythos’ may pose – I’ll let others far more qualified do that. But I’ve seen the huge value that the practice of coding-in-the-open brings, and it would be a tragedy of the commons to lose it.
Links
- On Maintenance from Sarah Fisher is great. I used to think that digital services were quite different from other civil works in not really having distinct ‘build’ and ‘maintain’ phases. But there might be parallels in other areas too: such as the suggestion that electrification of our railways would be better achieved as a rolling activity from a long-term funded team rather than as one-off big projects. Sounds familiar.
- Weeknote 1: What do we have here? from new joiner Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Welcome!
- For the NHS, by the NHS - our motto for NHS Digital Prevention Services now has a webpage, describing what this philosophy means to us.
The title for this week’s post comes from a Snow Patrol song that I heard a great rendition of by a busker on my way to the office. I had to skip a couple of tubes to hear it to the end and donate. Show me a garden that’s burstin’ into life.