NHSX and Mental Health Update 14
This is an informal update to NHSX’s commitment to:
Digital and data specialists from NHSX will team up with NHS England’s mental health national policy teams to help clinicians and policymakers improve patient experience through technology.
This is a selection of things that happened (other things also happened) from team members working on a discovery into children, young people and mental health…
Icebox Session part deux
In the first few days of discovery we ran an icebox session.
The aspiration was to;
let people get any ideas out of their system before we delve any deeper into the problem
Over the last few weeks, as we have learned more in the CYP space, we have also added to our icebox pile. This week we got to bring out our bundle of icebox’d ideas and go through them one last time to see if they retained any value and should be considered going forward.
By the end we didn’t end up with any extra ideas but we did add a bit more to some of the existing ones. It was great to do as we could now look at some of the earliest ideas in a new light, underpinned by the research we did. We picked out bits and pieces from ideas that could add value to existing ideas.
Write Ups
At the end of discovery we spent all of our time collating research, playing back our findings and designing possible ideas for alpha. We’ve since spent a large chunk of our time writing it all up.
We have a discovery report that we circulated to key stakeholders on Thursday afternoon and we are now in revision mode. The report links out to lots of the artefacts/findings/write-ups we did throughout the entire discovery. Still needs a sprinkle of extra editing before sharing a bit more widely.
We took inspiration from Doteveryone in its format - well worth checking out. Our report is kinda long (we aimed for 15 pages originally) but choc-full of good stuff. Was a really great atmosphere as we were putting it all together, huddled around our desks.
We’ve also separated our potential ideas out into another doc which is in the format of product briefs. We used these all the way back before the discovery kicked off. They are great when it comes to trying to prioritise what comes next.
Show and Tell
A final discovery show and tell with our colleagues working in CYP mental health.
As discovery is officially over, our ceremonies are now on hiatus. Show and tells likely to be replaced by some more formal playbacks of what we did/found and our ideas. We’ve booked in some and getting requests for more. We endeavour to be around to share and answer questions from stakeholders.
Team Activity
Tense table shuffleboard action last night with the team 🥌🏆 pic.twitter.com/dfaqG9scN8
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) October 10, 2019
We’ve all worked hard on the discovery over the last few weeks, so it was great for the team to take some time out on Wednesday evening and play a bit of (fairly competitive) shuffleboard in a local pub.
It would not surprise me if there is a future re-match.
Ethics/Consequence Scanning
We ran a consequence and ethics scanning event based on doteveryone’s guide.
We ran the exercise as we want to be responsible designers of services. We only had time to look at one idea within our discovery time frame (but will definitely do more). We wanted to expose any unintended consequences our idea could cause. The session left us with some proactive actions.
It was a useful exercise, good learning for the team.
Team tried the @doteveryone consequence scanning event yesterday. Was brill. Shorter than a pre-mortem, definitely something we'll repeat! https://t.co/csxCbTHOcD
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) October 15, 2019
Prioritisation
Prioritisation chats are all gearing up. Stakeholders and team need to agree collectively what’s next. We’ve been helping this process and packaging up findings/ideas so that can happen smoothly.
End of discovery retrospective
The team got together for an open chat about what went well and what can we do to make things better next time. Team care about iterating and improving and that includes how we work as well as the product/service.
Some highlights (there were more);
- An interesting problem we care about & is important
- User research as a team sport worked really well
- Team composition seen as a success
- Great team ethic and atmosphere throughout the discovery
- We finished with some practical actionable ideas for alpha
Weekly update hiatus
Now that we’ve come to the end of the discovery phase we’re going to put our weekly updates on hold temporarily.
We’ve had lots of positive comments about these and we’ve seen a few others expressing an interest to try it themselves.
Once we’ve confirmed what’s next then seems very likely we’ll resume these updates.
Find out more
If you want to stay informed about wider NHSX work then check out @NHSX on Twitter.
If you want to give us feedback or get in touch with the team then you can do so using this form!