What did I enjoy?
After the frustrations of the last month or so, the last full week of financial year 2025/26 brought many gifts:
- The team going live with a new approach to maternity self-referral, which stemmed from the work I initiated on the patient experience of first contact with the NHS.
- Early insights from a pilot to help women with worrying breast symptoms faster into a diagnostic service.
- Observing a couple of user research sessions with a prototype of potential changes to the NHS App.
- A first view of data linkage between NHS 111 online and telephone usage. About 30% of completed 111 triages are online, and the insights we get from this data will help us design a truly omnichannel service.
- A new way of presenting our directorate’s shared roadmap around cross-cutting themes which could really bring to life the activity I’m leading on access, triage and navigation.
I also enjoyed a morning in an amazing surgery in Surrey watching and chatting with a GP partner who is really making “total triage” work for his patients and his team.
On Wednesday in a monthly meeting of my leadership team, we took turns to share the things we’re most proud of from the past 12 months.
And on Thursday, the NHS England board met in the Leeds office, giving our colleagues based here a first chance to meet our new interim CEO and chair. Challenging questions were asked, and thoughtful, honest answers given. In the margins, I took the opportunity to ambush a couple of execs and ask them “are you getting what you need from digital?” The answers both gave were helpful, and I will follow up with them.
What was hard?
A policy question I had fed back on several weeks ago came back into my inbox again, with a quick turnaround for an answer, but no real movement from where I had left it when last consulted. I regretted that I had not been involved in the intervening back and forth when we might have used that time to shape an ambitious and deliverable proposal.
I see this as a symptom of the disconnect I was bemoaning in last week’s note. I channeled my frustration from last week into a blog post in the romantic style, and after that I felt better.
What do I need to take care of?
On Friday afternoon I put on my headphones and prepared some draft objectives for my appraisal conversation next week. The performance appraisal process has been running for a couple of months now, but for various scheduling reasons my own conversation with my manager has been pushed back. Given the pace of change in our organisational context, that delay has allowed me to frame a set of objectives for 2025/26 which cover the urgent delivery priorities we have to patients and frontline staff, and the shifting sands we’ll be working in as colleagues and teams. No spoilers here until I’ve discussed them with my manager.
Matt Edgar writes here 