Weeknotes 29th November 2024
Highlight of the week was spending time in our UR lab observing a session facilitated by Aaron. The focus was our pathways and streaming and redirection products with people with access needs. As always, I learnt something new and as always it reminded me about why we are here and the people that we are here to serve. It was particularly valuable as there had been a couple of frustrating days beforehand including multiple frustrating tasks that needed delivering asap, that each required me to delve into significant incomplete detail held in multiple sources in order to make decisions about them. The lab session snapped me back into doing what needs to be done to make a difference, even if its frustrating sometimes!
Also this week, I enjoyed catching up with Ben and bouncing thoughts and perspectives off his brain and catching up with James to provide support on how you do user research when you don’t have any user researchers but are committed to working in a user centred way. I joined a meeting where Alison shared her great work bringing together a large body of evidence that is helping us with strategic level work, had a pre meet for a session I am running with the digital professions team, a central UCD budget meeting, met with successful bidders for our UCD contract and gave feedback to others that had also taken part in the process. I also had a listen back to the problems worth solving podcast I recorded with Sam that went live this week. We covered a lot of things around putting the human into digital health and you can give it a listen at the following link https://open.spotify.com/episode/4w28H0Pbi2SpJbgJrU75OV?si=aeebd54fc135486c&nd=1&dlsi=2809f98aff874981
I jointly delivered a presentation to our clinical community on UCD, how usability is a clinical risk and how valuable it is to have clinical and UCD folk working together. This was expertly led by Eva and Lisa with Lia and I ducking in to input at points. On Thursday I met with Atif on day 4 in his new role as a Head of Product in digital primary care and also had my regular catch up with Mohit, one of our other Heads of product in this space. It’s great to see our product capability building up in our portfolio. Digital primary care is often a key to unlocking other services and delivering work that really makes a difference to the front line. There is so much potential for what we can do and impact we could have. You can be part of it too — there’s a Lead Product Manager vacancy at the link below
https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/M9990-24-1790?keyword=product%20manager&language=en
On my non-working day I put on my voluntary work hat on in my role as patient rep on the CanGene CanVar programme and attended a consensus meeting. Here I joined geneticists, genetic counsellors and academics to develop a consensus on the minimum level of recontact and follow up for people who are diagnosed with a genetic variation that makes them more likely to get breast and ovarian cancer. This was a day long meeting where we listened to the evidence from research and then each cast a vote on our agreement with various statements, with my vote as someone with lived experience of having one of these mutations, carrying equal weight to all the genetic experts in the room. As always my patient rep work brought me back to the value of the work I do in my day job, particularly how digital tools and capabilities combined with national data and registers can support a stretched front line to deliver patient care, prevent illness and save lives.
Next week is a shorter week for me but some of the things I will be doing are
- Meeting with primary care policy and improvement colleagues
- Data linkage workshop
- Product and Platforms Strategic planning days
- Meeting a lead user researcher who works in one of our regional teams
- Prepping for a couple of events I am speaking at the following week
