Weeknote 2nd December 2022

I had a really valauble meeting with Bola this week about inclusive design, digital inclusion and how we can align our work and support each other to deliver our visions for both. I also collated both her feedback and that of our design justice group into our plans or moving our work forward.

I attended a session on developing the new NHS England culture and met colleagues from the other organisations we are merging with. Whilst the aim of the session was to start to work on our collective culture, it also enabled us to make connections across our work and start working together on joint objectives. There is always greater value in these cross organisation sessions that can be gained on top of the original objectives. This week I also had 2 other meetings about inclusive design that came from a cross organisation meeting I attended a couple of weeks ago. Again, I hadn’t met any of these colleagues before and we found areas of collaboration and ways to break down organisational silos that we wouldn’t have otherwise. It is these conversations and the people that I am meeting that exemplifies the value of moving into the new NHS England, something I need to hang onto as we ride the rollercoaster of change.

I attended the UCD maturity community of practice and we are starting to see the change we were looking to generate though the model. One of the reasons we developed it was to relieve the burden from our UCD folk of having to convince people of the need to work in this way and training teams in how to do it well. In areas that have been through the maturity reviews, it feels like slowly some of those barriers are coming down. UCD in our organisation, whilst not perfect, is ahead of some of the other digital specialisms in its maturity and capability, having a community of practice, having operations capability, frameworks, standards and knowledge bank. So much of UCD folks time has sometimes been about plugging the gap in teams created by lack of multidisciplinary team roles in areas that were still evolving. As an organisation we are now working on how we bring the other DDAT professions to the place where UCD have got to so that we have more balance in our teams and less burden on people to fill the gap.

Also this week, I caught up with Lia about mindsets, design, inclusion and many other things. I had a meeting about user research and patient safety and how the NHS service standards and manual can support safer products. I met with HMRC colleagues to discuss joint working now that we are in a shared building in Leeds and our user research labs are neighbours. I was also interviewed in my role as patient rep on the BRCA-Direct study. This research demonstrated the feasibility and potential to deliver wider community testing for the BRCA mutation something that is now being piloted by NHS England. My personal and profession worlds colliding again.

There have been things that have frustrated me this week so again I set about challenging them. It has led to some open and productive conversations which have resolved the frustrated feelings, if not the things that were causing them. There have also been conversations where I have been on the other side of colleagues’ frustrations and been able to switch the pervading view through clarifying the objective facts. It is these small things, openness, communication, trust and psychologically safe environments that will get us through the tough times. I’m feeling grateful to work with the colleagues I have around me at the moment.

Talking of colleagues, Tero, Pete and I seem to have accidentally given ourselves a 30 day plank challenge. Not sure how it happened (or even why). At time of writing we have all done day 1 (20 seconds) and I have done day 2 (another 20 seconds). Pete has pointed out that we have to do 3.5 minutes on Christmas day so that should be interesting.

Next week

• Welcoming Sam to our UCD ops team
• 2 days in the London office
• First face to face UCD maturity review
• Procurement stuff
• Assurance stuff
• Christmas doo
• Building up to 1 minute long plank