Designing sustainable digital services in the NHS
The NHS has set an ambitious goal of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2040 for the emissions we control directly. And this is not just for environmental reasons. As the Greener NHS programme clearly states, climate change is a health risk, not just an environmental risk.
As the NHS embraces digital technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its services, it is important to consider the environmental impact of both. The energy consumption of servers and devices, the amount of data transmitted and stored, and the disposal and recycling of electronic equipment, are all factors that contribute to the carbon footprint of the NHS. With millions of users, including the staff of the NHS, accessing its digital services every day, we have a responsibility to make sure our digital offerings are not only effective and efficient, but also sustainable in the long run, and do not unduly contribute to the environmental impact of the health system.
Designing for sustainability working group
Almost one year ago, a dedicated sustainability working group at NHS Digital, led by designers Michael Norrington, Maddy Whitty, Brie Whyatt and Samantha Saw began to explore how our service design process can help the NHS and broader health and social care system meet our net zero goals. We recognise the crucial role that sustainability plays in the design and delivery of our products and services and want sustainability to be prioritised alongside other considerations during the service design process.
The working group started by facilitating a workshop at the sustainability-themed Design Community of Practice Away-Day to understand what was important to the design community when considering sustainability, and what barriers they believe they will encounter in their day-to-day work.
We were careful to make sure that the sustainability requirements placed on the design community were fair and appropriate. While the importance of sustainability cannot be overstated and we all agree we must act now, we did not want to put an undue burden on the designers without providing them with the necessary tools to manage the added responsibility.
The working group identified four key problem areas for embedding sustainability into the design process:
- guidance
- process and tools
- measuring impact
- senior leadership support
Based on the feedback, we decided to prioritise ‘guidance’ as the starting point: How might we help designers understand the importance of sustainability in their practice and incorporate core concepts into their thinking and into our design processes? Or simply, how might we help our designers to ask the right questions to initiate a meaningful conversation about sustainability?
Proposing a new design principle
The NHS digital design principles provide guidance for anyone designing products and services for the health and care system, including accessibility, usability, and user needs.
Starting with a design principle is starting small. From this we can expand towards more detailed guidance and eventually working with the GOV.UK Service Standard team and the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) assurance team to embed sustainability into the NHS Service Standard.
We would now like to share two options for a new NHS design principle with a wider audience and gather your thoughts. Please note that a principle is a concise statement of intent and not to provide the level of detail found in a standard, handbook, or toolkit.
The two options convey a similar message but have different headings and paragraphs that could be interchangeable. Please let us know what you think about them.
OPTION #1:
Design for sustainability
The climate crisis is a health crisis.
Be curious about the impact of your design decisions on the environment and encourage your team to challenge existing processes.
OPTION #2:
Design to protect the environment
Explore the impact of your design decisions on the environment.
Encourage your team to challenge existing processes and re-use resources.
We wanted to focus on environmental sustainability as this was the one that resonated most with the design community. We felt the sociological and economical aspects of sustainability are covered in our other design principles, but the environmental aspect was missing.
We would like this principle to encourage designers and anyone who is designing digital products and services for the NHS to consider the environmental impacts of their designs, and to strive for solutions that minimise negative impacts and maximise positive ones.
There are many ways that this principle could be applied in practice. For example, designers could reuse the common code and components already available in the NHS digital design system, or consider the energy and resource usage of digital services and aim to reduce the carbon footprint of these services wherever possible. Another example might involve designing services that minimise data usage or the size of images or videos stored in servers, or work with our technical architects to optimise the server infrastructure of the service.
While some of these questions may be challenging to measure, they are still important to discuss, for example, how could designing more accessible and inclusive digital products and services reduce the travel needed by patients and staff and in turn, affect the environmental impact?
By adopting the new principle, the NHS design community could make sure that the digital products and services we deliver are not only effective and efficient, but also sustainable in the long run.
We would love to hear your thoughts on these options. Please reply to me here in Medium, or take to Twitter, using the hashtag #NHSPrinciple. We look forward to your valuable feedback and input into our process.
