Why it's important
Health is complex. People often do not know how health and care organisations and services fit together. It helps if you can bring things together into a journey which makes sense to users, irrespective of which organisation they “belong” to or the channel they use.
You may not be able to fix a whole problem, but you may be able to improve it and to support or influence a wider solution.
What you should do
Your team should be able to show that you:
- understand where the user need you’re addressing fits into wider healthcare journeys or how it will join up with other things to solve a whole problem for users
- make it easy for users to focus on the next step in a journey or in managing their health, helping them get the right help from the right place at the right time
- are addressing any problems with internal processes, policy or legislation that make it difficult to join things up and to address a whole problem
- work with front line and admin staff, where appropriate, and invite them and policy people to attend user research and to contribute to decisions
- research, test and make changes to users’ experience of online and offline channels (for example, call centre scripts and letters)
- minimise the number of times users provide the same information to NHS services (while respecting their privacy)
- have a viable service with a scope that is based on how users think – not too wide and not too narrow
- have considered alternatives to creating a service – for example, running a health campaign, partnering with another organisation, or making an API available – or doing nothing
- have built relationships with other teams and organisations to make your service more effective
- work in the open so that people outside the organisation know what you are doing, to increase the potential for collaboration and reduce duplication of effort
Guidance
GOV.UK resources
- Encouraging people to use your service online
- Getting the scope of your transaction right
- Working across organisational boundaries
Read more about this
- How a 20-year-old standard is still relevant today (NHS Digital blog, 2022)
- How to design a login for the modern NHS (NHS Digital blog, 2019)
- What service communities are achieving across government (GDS blog, 2019)