Planning

We had an in‑person 3‑month planning day with our teams. We have 5 teams loosely aligned around helping people understand their health and find support to stay well.

Our focus for the day was thinking about how we help our teams collaborate. We ran a session where the teams mapped the next 3 months work against a high‑level journey map. This gives visibility of where there’s overlap and need to work together.

We also asked the teams to talk about common things they’re all dealing with:

  • finding people to partner with to run pilots
  • sending messages
  • governance

And areas where some teams are dealing with now and others will need to in the future:

  • getting health data from users
  • recommending and connecting people to the next step of their journey
  • helping people form habits

The other thing we wanted from the day is for people to get to know each other better. That basically meant not packing the day too tightly and including some activities that helped people to build bridges.

What we mean when we talk about personalisation

Paola Roccuzzo very kindly agreed to come and speak to our teams. Paola worked on a project that looked into how GOV.UK would work if it was personalised.

Her work demonstrates the value of having people who care about language and user‑centred design involved in projects from the start (and not expecting content designers to be people who polish language at the end). She’s created meaningful definitions of what personalisation and its component parts are.

She gave a great talk, I could feel people’s understanding shifting as she spoke. I’m keen for these definitions to become part of our everyday vocabulary.

Co‑design

We have a fortnightly catch‑up for UCD people in Personalised prevention services.

I’d asked Charley Pothecary and Emma Parnell to run a session on co‑design. In the past I’ve had a bit of a bias against co‑design. I’ve held a scepticism that ‘co‑design’ is performative, users might be able to tell you what they want but it’s the designer’s job to give them what they need.

Working in healthcare this year has made me shift that view. I’m convinced that designing with people is a necessary part of our process. People’s attitudes to health are emotive and complex and we need to work with people to find what works for them.

Charley and Emma’s experience and expertise in designing for and with people on complex, highly emotional subjects is part of why we hired them.

The session they ran was great, in a similar way to Paola’s session, it started with clarity about what good co‑design is and isn’t.

Some things that stood out was about how co‑design is part of partnering with other organisations well. Bringing them into the process so we work together in a way that works for all parties. Charley and Emma referred to it as co‑designing the co‑design.

The other thing was how we make sure co‑design has mutual benefit for all. If the service is unlikely to meet the needs of the people involved in the co‑design then it’s probably better not to put people through this process.

Talking therapies pilot

We launched a pilot this week. It’s small, but the overhead of getting anything out into the world and have real people using it is so high here that it‘s a victory. More importantly, having something in the hands of real users has already taught us things. For example, we hand off to a service finder that has a brittle search algorithm and we need to be careful how we prepare users for that.

I’m pleased for the team. Hopefully we’ll be following it up with another pilot or at least something else in the hands of real people very soon.

Health kiosks

We visited a community centre in Tower Hamlets where they’re piloting health kiosks – machines that measure height, weight, and blood pressure in about 4 minutes.

Turns out I’m an inch shorter than I thought and have mildly raised blood pressure.

The quirks of a service like this are interesting. Lots of people return repeatedly. Having immediate feedback about your health is potentially quite addictive. Groups who feel stigma in traditional healthcare prefer the machine. White men who learn they’re shorter and heavier than expected assume the machine is wrong and give it a low NPS score.

The Tower Hamlets pilot is similar to one in Southwark. Both validate some of our assumptions. People are willing to check their health but translating that into outcomes is hard. We heard about a pilot in Watford that has focused on connecting people to services, I’m keen to learn more about that.

Kiosks will need to be part of what we offer. Multiple access routes matter for reaching people who need support most.

1‑year at NHSE

This week I completed a year at NHSE. As a special treat I was logged out of everything.

Mat Johnson and Roz Strachan published 2 great design history posts this week. Both explore the hard details we need to get right to make our services work: