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A bumper double edition of weeknotes, having skipped last week’s to work on my NHS Leadership Academy Bevan Programme “element 2” draft. Also, this happened…

LinkedIn update: Congratulate Matt for being promoted to Associate director of design and user research at NHS Digital

This new role in our Product Development directorate lets me work across a wider range of NHS Digital products and services, and build a small central design and user-research function in addition to the roles we have embedded in product teams. Thanks to all who said nice things on my LinkedIn update 🙂

1. What leadership teamwork did I see?

  • Helen and Nicola working together on a workshop to improve the way we engage with people. The workshop included members of the public and patient representatives working side-by-side with programme directors and other colleagues from NHS Digital and NHSX. We took away lots to inform the development of policies and tools for patient engagement across both organisations.
  • Digital Services Delivery practice leads Trilly, Dean, Mohammed, Stuart, Rochelle and Eva welcoming our new cohort of graduate trainees. It’s the biggest group we’ve ever had, and I can’t wait to see what they’ll do as they get to work on their first assigments in design, user research, content, product and delivery management. Special mention to Simon, one of our user researchers who coordinates graduate placements across all those roles, who has worked hard to get us to this point.
  • As ever, I’m impressed by the good-humoured seriousness of my Bevan Programme learning set peers, who all submitted drafts of their work in time for a deadline this week, especially the ones who have other things going on that they’ve had to deal with.

2. How did I make expectations clear?

  • With my new role announced to colleagues, I was able to get to work on planning how we’re going to create the new central design and user research capability. I gathered the leads for both roles together on a call and set up a Microsoft Teams site to start planning. I’ve proposed that we plan our work in two 3-month missions to take us up to the end of this financial year.

3. What connections did I make?

  • Coffee with one of our clinical leads who was interested in the future of the NHS Common User Interface standards.
  • Meeting colleagues from the health service in Northern Ireland who were on a visit to London.

4. What inspired me this week?

  • The patient engagement workshop – it was great to see senior NHS Digital and NHSX people having productive conversations about how we can improve our services through better quality engagement.
  • The new graduates, who asked great questions of the profession leads.
  • Seeing the tweets from UK Healthcamp (sorry not to be there this time.)

5. What do I need to take care of?

  • Moving from collective consultation into implementation on the organisation change process, on which I am leading for a part of my profession group.
  • Making sure we make the most of the learning and outputs from the patient engagement workshop. I’m determined that we will use these to change the way we design and deliver services.

6. How did I uphold the NHS Constutition?

  • In my profession lead’s welcome, I asked our new graduates to read the Constitution. It’s important that they understand our commitments to patients and the public – to improve everyone’s health and wellbeing, to help people stay well, to get better when they’re ill, and to care for them at the end of life. I also highlighted the commitments in the Constitution that are specifically for staff. As new NHS employees, all our graduates should expect rewarding and worthwhile work, to be trusted and given freedom to act, and to be listened to when they need to speak up.

Original source – Matt Edgar writes here

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