Novembernotes

Some of the things I have been doing

I’ve had a bit of an alternative unplanned busman’s holiday this month that wiped out a week of it. My daughter and I caught covid so I was forced to do immersive ethnographic research, luckily only in my own home. I experienced and used many of the products and services that we have delivered at NHS Digital to support the covid response (and more) and was very grateful for them.

This month I attended power and privilege training and spent time reflecting on my own power and privilege, how I can put it to best use and also the impact that it has on others. The course was expertly led by Clara and colleagues and is a kickstarter for how we and I can do things better.

I have also been sitting on leadership assessment panels for our director recruitment, chairing panels for cross-organisational user research recruitment and leading the user research element of our organisation wide capability and capacity programme. I also helped colleagues in NHSx with the recruitment and selection of a Head of User Research.

I performed my role as board member of the Digital Technology Assurance Board, advised colleagues in the primary care space on how to approach user research, caught up with Kathryn and Simon in NHSx and went into the office to meet Tero face to face for the first time in 20 months.

I also worked with clinical colleagues to form an ethics board to review cross NHSD and NHSx work on children and young people’s mental health. We formed the board to ensure safeguarding and ethical risks were assured ahead of the research going ahead. I bounced my thoughts off clinical colleagues and they bounced theirs off me. The joint clinical and research ethics perspective is a powerful one that analysed the research proposed in a much more robust way than separate discussions would have done.

The long anticipated Laura Wade-Gery review was published. You can access it here. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/putting-data-digital-and-tech-at-the-heart-of-transforming-the-nhs. It makes a number of recommendations in including the merger of NHS England and Improvement, NHS Digital and NHSx.

Front and centre of the report is working in a user centred way, in-fact recommendation one states ‘commit to a patient and citizen centred organising principle for future service transformation’ recommendation 5 states that the new organisation needs to ‘adopt a user, patient and citizen centred approach.’ and recommendation 7 ‘Foster a more agile and flexible workplace focused on meeting user needs.’ It also states that there is a need ‘to ensure that those in decision making positions are constantly aware of the day to day reality of the citizen experience, and make real the commitment to a patient and citizen centred approach.’

The core of this report is a focus on working in a user centred way which starts with understanding user needs through user research. Since I started at NHS Digital 6 years ago, this has been the focus of my work, helping to drive a user centred culture across the organisation and then across the system. I have been developing the user research capacity, capability and standards across the NHS Digital and supported the wider system to do so too. We now have a user-centred design maturity framework, research operations capability and a user research community of practice that started in NHS Digital but has developed to include our colleagues in NHSx, NHS England and Improvement and others across the system. We are already working cross-organisation and collaborating on the ground wherever we can as it just makes sense. We are also working cross-profession, linking our user centred design framework with engineering and product maturity. There is so much that we can bring to this merger and the implementation of the recommendations of the report. There is also so much that the recommendations and the breaking down of system silos will bring to what we do too.

What I have been thinking about

The amount of people whose work helped me when I had covid. It wasn’t just friends and family that made sure we had everything we needed and checked how I was feeling. It was many more people, many of whom I have never met. From the people that developed the test service which meant that, although my daughter had no symptoms, when I was worried she might have caught it from her friend, I could easily do a lateral flow test her to find out. Without this service and the availability of tests to asymptomatic people, that day she would have gone to the cinema with her 73 year old grandad, her older cousin and potentially infected both them and everyone else in the cinema.

Although my job means I know quite a bit about what to do when you suspect or have covid, I was grateful for the NHS website as a source of reassuring, up to date and clear information when I was unsure.

I am also really grateful to everyone that was involved in me being double vaccinated — from the people that developed the vaccine and those that developed and took part in the trials, to those that developed the vaccination booking service, arranged the logistics of how to vaccinate people and the people that gave me the vaccine in my arm. Without it I am sure that my symptoms would not have been mild.

But it isn’t just the people working on covid related services that played a part in my covid journey. As someone with a chronic condition, my GP practice regular checks that my asthma is under control and advises me on how best to use my medication to prevent attacks. The electronic prescription service sits there in the background meaning that I can get easy access to my repeat prescription from my pharmacy and the NHS App means I can re-order my inhalers without going to the surgery. The NHS login which I led discovery and alpha research on meant that I have access to do all of this and together this means that I have my medication when I need it. Having been able to take my steroid preventer inhaler every day over the past couple of years means my asthma is well controlled and I am sure contributed to the fact that covid didn’t trigger an attack.

No one product or service is an island. No one product or service meant that my health outcome of being well was met. Person centred health and care can only be achieved through collaboration of products and services (digital and non-digital). Health outcomes can only be achieved through collaboration of products and services.

Things I am doing in December

· User research community away day

· Finish and publish user centred maturity framework blog post

· Coach and mentor a number of people going through various recruitment processes

· Sit on the recruitment panel for Head of Delivery roles

· Digital transformation of screening programme board

· UCD as a profession in the NHS steering group

· Shuri network shadowing programme host

· Voluntary work as a rep on the CanGene CanVar patient panel

· Having some time off work with family and friends