Weeknotes 3: Our first Show & Tell & time to reflect

5 April 2019, Written by Joanna Choukeir, Health Director, FutureGov

This week felt so rewarding for the team!

The brilliant, blended NHS Digital and FutureGov field team wrapped up engagement in East London. Over three weeks across six urgent and emergency care settings, we spoke with and shadowed nearly 60 patients and staff.

Our last setting was Homerton University Hospital, where we were impressed with how staff fully embrace digital to solve day-to-day challenges.

Overall, we’re thankful to everyone who has given their time and openly shared their experiences. We want to specially thank Tower Hamlets CCG, and particularly Jenny Cook, the Deputy Director for Primary and Urgent Care; Julie Dublin, the Head of Urgent Care; and Azmi Peerun, the Transformation Manager for Primary and Urgent Care Commissioning; for trusting our approach and being open to introducing us to their networks across East and North East London. Thank you.

Almost every person we were connected with taught us something new, led us to other contacts or set up further exploration opportunity. We’re very much looking forward to returning in June — once we have synthesised insights from the three locations — to share and validate findings and co-design and test emergent opportunities for digital.

The first Show & Tell

We held our first Show & Tell on Tuesday, sharing our work so far over Sprints 0 and 1. The morning was well attended and we thank everyone who made the time to be there, to show interest and share feedback.

Because we’ve been moving through this work at pace, we’ve covered a lot of ground in the last six weeks. And we have a lot to show for it.

We knew that some joining us at the Show & Tell may know more than others, so we designed the session to run with flexibility. We sectioned the content we had to share into four separate zones, inviting guests to choose two zones where they felt they knew the least about the progress. In each, we shared:

• why we’re taking a service design and person-centred approach
• how we’re framing the work
• its opportunity and initial hypotheses
• how we’re mapping England’s urgent and emergency care ecosystem
• some of the things we’ve seen and heard from the field

Our steering group joined the Show & Tell, which we followed with our first meeting to reflect on the work so far. Together, we laid the groundwork for success as we move forward.

We discussed how insight about “what good UEC looks like” is held in lots of different places, including:

• policy documents such as the NHS Long Term Plan
• experienced clinicians and non-clinicians who have learned through doing
• patients whose experiences have taught them what to expect and how things could have been better
• providers and suppliers who have innovated with different ways of doing things over the years

Lots of people know lots of things about urgent and emergency care. Yet, there isn’t one single person who can possibly see the full picture from where they’re sitting with the level of complexity, diversity and variation in the system.

There’s a lot of opinion over what good should look like. This recent Twitter thread is the perfect testimony to this. So, we discussed that success would be to bring all of this insight, knowledge, assumptions, and hypotheses in one place. To validate it, show the full picture of urgent and emergency care and tell an evidenced, end-to-end story, from a person-centred perspective about what the north star for digital first urgent and emergency care should feel like.

What’s next

We’re taking time to reflect over the next two weeks. Time to write up our notes, synthesise the data, refine our engagement approach and methods ready for our deep dive into Somerset and time to recharge over the Easter break. We’re pleased that Somerset CCG is keen to collaborate on this work. We’ll be starting initial conversations with local stakeholders to set the groundwork for our engagement there, starting 23 April.

Get in touch with Sophie Dennis or Joanna Choukeir if you’d like to chat through any of the work.