NHS Digital
Service framework for digital health
Working with the Digital team at the National Health Service (NHS) to help create a framework approach to user-centred service delivery.
I was brought in to work with User Centered Design team leaders Matt Edgar, Tero Väänänen and Rochelle Gold to help identify and categorise all the front-facing user services offered by NHS Digital services.
The client
NHS Digital was the specialist digital arm of the NHS responsible for national digital infrastructure, health data, digital products and services.
My client Product Development was responsible for national products and service delivery for the NHS. Managing some of the UK’s most used services including the; NHS website (16m daily visits), NHS app (31m registrations), login (44m accounts), booking services (520k monthly) and support for NHS service delivery. In February 2023 it was merged with NHS England to become a single united organisation.
My role
To support and advise leadership in the user-centred design team.
To help create tools for improving service delivery across NHS digital by uniting service delivery and mental models across service design.
To understand and explain the needs and barriers for user-centred service delivery for health in a way that can be understood by varied stakeholders.
The work
Scope
To better understand the value and opportunity digital can deliver for the NHS by better articulating service overlaps and opportunities for ‘reuse’ in a way that could unite people across the organisation.
Description
I worked to create a model to simplify and codify how NHS digital services relate to each other. My starting place was to understand the offer from a use-centred perspective across service journey intents at an organisational level.
I worked to do this in an inclusive way that could be shared across teams and different areas of expertise. Allowing NHS to better articulate the extent of its offer, repeating service needs and organisational digital capabilities.
Outcomes
A user-centred health service framework to help present high-level service offers simply for teams and leaders. This work has continued to be adapted and used by NHS teams. (You can see my posts and Tero Väänänen’s post here).
Supporting the articulation of the value of user-centred practice in service delivery.
Increased awareness of the relationships between internal organisational structures, user-centred service delivery and narrative across digital teams and leaders.
Key activities
Framework approach: Creating a unifying way of way of explaining value by demonstrating duplicating intention, pain points, user needs or service delivery in one view that multiple experts can understand.
Visual tools: Creating visual tools to explain concepts to unite different areas of the organisation to tackle barriers such as conflicting understanding, meanings and differences in approach across professional teams.
Supporting leadership: Working with the UCD leadership team to help articulate and user-centred value and achievements as well as support prioritisation of next steps.
Service thinking for health: Progressing service thinking to align with the conditions found in health service journeys. (See my post here).