Weeknote 23rd February to 1st March

Some of the things I was involved in this week

• Lots of business planning and securing budgets to be able to deliver what we want to achieve next year.
• Caught up with Tosin about many things including the work he has been doing on stakeholder mapping.
• Led the covid community of practice where Thomas talked about the work the covid testing team have been doing on account and the importance of researching the digital alongside the physical
• Had a really productive first meeting with one of our new service design delivery partners where we talked about how we can best work together.
• Dealing with a couple of issues that are important to manage right but are those things that seem small at first then evolve and take up a lot of time to deal with.
• Related: managed to get probably 50% of my blog post written but haven’t managed to complete it.
• Had a chat with someone outside of the organisation who really wants to start their career in user research but is finding it hard due to the lack of entry level roles. We need to do better at this and I have ideas, just need to create space to put them into practice.
• On my non-working day, I performed one of my other roles and one that puts me on the other side of the desk to usual. I am a patient reference panel member and a patient and public involvement representative for a group of research studies relating to cancer genetics. Bit of a busman’s holiday as the meeting was about reviewing some patient facing tools. It has however made me keen to look at how we get better at integrating the complementary approaches that are user research and public involvement.
• It was really good to see that it is now technically possible to look someone up on the Patient Demographic Service (PDS) without having to ask about gender — a question that had been causing significant distress for many people and a change that should have happened long ago. https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/api-catalogue/personal-demographics-service-fhir#api-Default-searchPatient You can hear more about how my colleagues pushed for this change as part of service week this week https://twitter.com/worddoodles_EP/status/1365367400699420678?s=20
• It was also good to see colleagues talking in the open about how we are working harder to listen to seldom listened to voices https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEaVNhR1dtA&feature=youtu.be

What made me think

Being on the other side of the desk as a patient representative made me think about a number of things. One was a conversation with Nancy about research ethics, user research standards and researcher competence. The importance of these is not only about robust data but also about how we need to respect and value the emotional energy that a participant brings and expends in a user research session.

I am a member of the patient reference panel because of my experience of having a cancer causing genetic mutation, including the loss of my mum. Using my lived experience for my work on the panel certainly used my emotional energy and brought back memories of that loss. There are many things that can also randomly trigger those memories as I go about my every day life, a song, a phase or even just something someone is wearing.

As user researchers, we really do not know what could be triggers for participants involved in research. As user researchers we need to be skilled and able to not only notice when something has had an emotional impact but also be able to know what to do when it does. When user researchers are not trained, experienced and developed through supervised practice, we are leaving both the participant and user researcher at risk of harm.

Some of the things I plan to do next week

• Introductory meeting with another of our new service design partners
• More work on the product development design and strategy implementation
• Work with the content profession on the service design maturity model
• Finish the blog post!