I started working in a different team this week. A team that sits across Digital Prevention Services Portfolio (DPSP). The team will be doing some new work – figuring out how we coordinate prevention services in the NHS app.
Origin story
I've spoken to a few people this week about how this work came about. I think there's more to the story than I know, but roughly:
About a year ago, we created a vision for personalised prevention – to help people understand their health risks and connect them to the right support, in an ongoing cycle. Over time the vision was adopted as the direction for all of Digital Prevention Services Portfolio (DPSP).
In Personalised Prevention Services we explicitly told teams to not think too much about working with the NHS app while in discovery and alpha phases of work. We wanted to test the core hypothesis before engaging with a team that has an incredibly long backlog and an understandably high threshold of quality.
The NHS app is central to the 10‑year plan for the NHS. Many teams across DPSP are already building things for the app. Behaviour change, screening, vaccinations, child health, home testing – each working independently. I was in a few sessions where people were asking how we move from separate teams each doing their own thing to something that resembles the vision and who owns that problem. It felt necessary for DPSP to be able to answer those questions and think about the shared work necessary for all teams to deliver on the vision.
That’s what the new team will be looking at.
Also – I want to emphasise to anyone reading this from DPSP – this doesn’t mean we are in any way a gatekeeper, or blocker to teams working with the app. Keep doing the things you’re doing.
Scope
The scope is not totally clear to me yet. I think it lies somewhere between ‘prevention in the app’ and ‘manage my health’.
‘Prevention in the app’ is about how we shape work across behaviour change support, screening and health checks, vaccinations, child health and home testing so that we have a coherent experience for users.
‘Manage my health’, which I think probably has been defined somewhere – but not that I’ve seen – would include prevention, but also other areas of a person’s interactions with the NHS, for example, users managing long‑term conditions should be part of ‘managing your health‘.
The scope will be in part set by how the app team want to federate responsibility. I think the app team are seeking to support more teams to work autonomously. From a distance, it looks like a question of topology and organisation design.
I had a good conversation with design lead for the app, Mike Gallagher, about this. Part of the conversation was also about one of the most fundamental problems for the app – how to connect stuff to other stuff. This is the same problem I’ve been grappling with for the last year. Connecting stuff to stuff addresses a core problem of the NHS that manifests everywhere. How do you reduce the overhead of understanding your health and navigating a system as complex as the NHS?
My immediate future has two streams of work.
- Understanding what we can connect quickly and usefully within Digital Prevention Services.
- Defining what a coherent health management experience will look like for NHS app users.
Speaking to teams across DPSP will inform how we do both, so my next month of work will be about understanding what people are working on and where there are opportunities.
There’s a lot to do. I’m excited and a little overwhelmed. Clarity will come as we start to make the connections real.