Immunisation Consent Discovery: Part 2
We’ve had a couple of sprints since the first post about this project, so I think it’s worth an update here.
We wanted to do some qualitative research with parents and guardians of children and the school staff that are involved in the immunisation process, but our timing wasn’t great… the school summer holidays delayed us quite a bit!
In the meantime we focused on desk research, looking at what other organisations are doing, understanding the costs of delivering the offline service and reviewing the results of the brief survey we did. There were 20 responses, which isn’t bad but I think we’ll try and get more.
Another thing we were able to do during the holidays was have a think about what we needed to get from interviews with parents and school staff. I spent a bit of time writing out these research goals (see cover image). This helped with writing the user research discussion guides and we shared them with the wider team for feedback.
The end of summer holidays has meant a burst of user research activity!
We’ve used the discussion guide in 3 school staff interviews so far and I think they seem to be doing the job, but we’ve also been lucky with the staff we’ve spoken to, who have all been really open with us. They’ve also all been really complimentary about our Immunisation Coordinator too, so we are looking forward to passing those comments on to her at the next show and tell!
We’ve been taking audio recordings of the interviews too. I’ve found this really beneficial, since I struggle with taking notes and have a bad memory. I spent some time reviewing the recordings and creating basic process maps with post-its. These will feed into the master map we’ll create based on all the research, at the end of Discovery.
We are still trying to recruit parents/guardians to speak to. This isn’t proving to be as easy as it sounds! We arranged one session at one of the schools we did staff research at and got letters sent out to parents, offering £10 vouchers for 30 minute sessions. Sadly there were no takers. We are going to try a different approach — going to where the parents are — so have arranged to attend some Chatterbooks and Coding club sessions at the libraries, where parents are already there waiting for their children.
Vision
We used our 4th show and tell as an opportunity to co-create a shared vision for the project. It’s important to have a touchstone for the project, something we can refer back to throughout to keep us focused on the right outcomes. It’s a first draft, but we came up with:
“A service that everyone can trust to deliver safe, high quality immunisation care that is responsive to needs”
We’ll play this back to more of the immunisation team at the next show and tell, to get feedback and refine if necessary.
To bid, or not to bid?
In the first post about this project I also mentioned we were thinking about an MHCLG Local Digital Fund bid. A discovery about the automatic updating of healthcare records by Local Authorities, as part of digital services. We put a fair bit of time into thinking about this, mostly because we were quite excited about the possibilities! However, the more we researched the more we came to realise that it wasn’t something we could bid for funding for.
There are a number of products for our specific use case already on the market that integrate with SystmOne, in different ways.
We also spoke to NHS Digital, who were really helpful. We discovered there are a number of projects underway nationally that are looking to increase the messaging between different systems, for different applications. GP Connect, NEMS, NRL are some of the things they are doing in this space.
Some of this overlaps with what we are looking at, but the timescales don’t really align with our project. We’ll definitely keep an eye on how things develop with the national programmes though.
What’s next?
We have a couple more staff interviews we are trying to organise and the parent sessions mentioned earlier. I expect they will keep us busy over the next couple of sprints, with some time to do some analysis.
We currently follow the Double Diamond approach of Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver, so will be moving into the Define stage next.
We’ve set a target discovery finish date of 8 October. Although if you follow the GDS style agile method of Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live we’ll still be in Discovery!
We’ll try to post in a few weeks about our Discovery findings.
