Digital service at the NHS

Working with the wonderful UCD team at NHS Digital to define a framework approach for digital services and service differences in health situations.

It was a real pleasure to meet such a talented and passionate group and inspiring to hear about some of the things they achieved under the pressures of covid. Propper 🎩🎩🎩 hats off!!

This work involved building on the work of Head of Design Tero Väänänen, service designer Emma Parnell and others to look at the catalogue of services that cut across NHS / NHS Digital. (You can check out Tero’s posts on health service journeys here and here). This also gave me the opportunity to really progress some of my existing thinking around how we think of services and how they can be systematically structured.

It has been interesting to see how service design has developed since the work I did back in 2014 on service system mapping at MoJ. Observing how some things have really moved forward leaps and bounds and perhaps how others have not progressed quite as intended. There are many opportunities in the service space that are missed and ample opportunities for better-delivering outcomes rather than processes.

I am really not big on blogging, I really do struggle to have the motivation to do kind of thing over the joy I feel for just diving in and doing the work! So sharing process work always feels pretty unnatural to me. That said I feel like working with the team at NHSD really made me realise how important a better, more united understanding of what we mean when we say ‘service’ is.

The health space is super complex and considering its challenges really helped me to hone some of my past thinking, and perhaps sharing some of these service concepts might help service discussions!