Back to work after a much-needed 2-week holiday in southern Germany.
What did I enjoy?
Being back in the office, refreshed after my holiday. The new NHS England Leeds office is a great place to work, and getting busier with colleagues from various product teams.
On Wednesday I joined members of our Patient and Public Voice (PPV) Board for Digital Urgent and Emergency Care who were visiting the office to find out how we research with users to make sure our products are clear, usable, and accessible. Leigh demonstrated the kit that teams use in the Accessibility Lab, and then we went downstairs to the ground floor where Lisa, Tom, and Rochelle demonstrated the User Research Lab. Board members asked some great questions, and afterwards said how much they enjoyed meeting the teams.
Enjoy isn’t quite the word for this week’s 111 online show and tell, which covered improvements to text content about vomiting, and pictures to help people identify impetigo, shingles, tick bites and Lyme disease. Some great work to make health information easier to understand, and therefore safer for patients.
What was hard?
There were no major surprises in my inbox on my return from leave, but one thing that cropped up on Friday had caused concern for some team members. Our team’s work spans the digital, transformation, policy and operational areas of the new NHS England, and in this case, there had been a lack of clarity about which governance route an important piece of work was following. Everyone is being pragmatic and wants to do the right thing. We’ll work it out.
Understandably, colleagues are anxious to preserve what their legacy organisation has brought to the merger. But I have noticed a tendency for this to tip over into doing down the skills or practice of the other legacy organisations. I worked in both the legacy NHS Digital and legacy NHS England, neither of which were perfect, and I found myself defending against unwarranted assertions about both of them this week. Each of us knows a lot about what our own former organisation did, but much less about the others. We have to take care not to rush to judgement based on incomplete knowledge, here-say, or tribalism.
What did I learn?
One of the good things I noticed was that while I was away, team members played to their strengths and helped each other out. Some things that spooked one colleague were easily sorted out by another, and vice versa. In a merger, we often find ourselves working alongside new people whose strengths we don’t yet know, but I can see signs that colleagues are getting to know each other better, supporting each other, and asking for help. That’s a good sign.
Matt Edgar writes here 