Springtime changes
In March, I moved from my Digital Transformation role with Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire CCG to join the team @SABPDigital.
In my new role as Clinical Pathways Product Manager I’m heading up one of the design teams in the Digital Directorate. Two departures for me; one from the Delivery Management direction I came to know through agency roles and two for being my first full time role outside my beloved Bristol area!
SABP (Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust) is a mental health trust, who have rapidly transformed the way they’re delivering digital over the last few years. As an outsider, learning about their strategy and recent shift in way of working was exciting — a local NHS organisation committing to Agile delivery and user-centred design? Not something you hear about every day.
I came across Surrey and Borders whilst taking a deep dive on a number of NHS Provider and ICS level digital strategies. The SABP 2020 strategy ‘Every person, every story’ immediately stood out to me. The NHS isn’t short of leadership in support of user centred design, but this level of commitment to the approach set them apart from numerous other areas I’d encountered. It goes beyond theoretical agreement or support for the approach, and seriously commits. The other significant changes to roles, team structure, ways of working and the numerous successful deliveries they’ve achieved since clearly hang off the back of this strategy, and their overall digital leadership.
The four, soon to be five, multi-disciplinary design teams are made up of Product Manager, Scrum Master, User Researchers and UX Designers. The teams’ scope and remit usually relates to user experience and design improvements within the Trust’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system. The exciting thing to me, beyond the improvements delivered by current projects, is that this sort of set-up puts SABP in a position to iterate and continuously improve in the long term. The scope of the design teams might largely relate to the EPR now, but they’ve got the skills and the ways of working to diversify their remit, when the time comes…
The long term priority of the design team I’m leading is the Digital Aspirant + Programme. SABP are one of three mental health trusts involved, as part of a National programme investing in EPR innovation: Several trusts selected for NHSX’s Digital Aspirant Plus programme (digitalhealth.net).
There’s two main tranches to this work within SABP. The first relates to our EPR’s architecture.
1. Remodelling our EPR Architecture
SystmOne was first implemented in SABP to replace Rio in 2016. It was set up with a ‘single unit structure’, which means the vast majority of Trust services exist in a shared architecture. Over time, (and as the EPR continues to be developed) it has become evident that this decision limits flexibility and functionality for system users — with some frustrating consequences for the near 2,000 staff currently impacted.
The first tranche of work will be the delivery of a multiple unit structure, better architected to map to SABP’s existing directorates, services and the relationships between these teams.
This work promises to unlock a range of benefits for the services we migrate, ranging from simple improvements that will help services only see functions and content that’s relevant to them, through to introducing more complex functionality — currently restricted due to the single unit structure. New functionality we’ll be looking to prioritise in the first phase of migrating to multiple units includes:
- Wait lists
- Rotas
- Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration and Electronic Prescribing Service (EMPA and EPS)
- Pathology results
2. Open data architecture
The other side of the programme is focussed on loosening our reliance on our EPR Platform when it comes to our data, improving how it can be used and shared, to improve workflow and user experience. Creating an open architecture — a centralised data repository that sits separately to SystmOne — will improve the Trusts’ reporting capability and enable integration with wider services and applications, through APIs.
Whilst I’ve a lot still to learn about the plans and design work needed for this side of the programme, needless to say it’s exciting. Anything that reduces vendor lock-in in the NHS gets my buy-in!
Maternal & Perinatal Mental Health projects
Whilst the Digital Aspirant + programme scoping and planning progresses, I’ve been busy with two projects — one for a new Maternal mental health service and the other enabling expansion and improvement of the existing Perinatal mental health service. Getting hands on with some delivery has been the best way to settle in and get up to speed with a new organisation and team.
This week has been Maternal Mental Health week.
My partner Chris and I are expecting at the moment— our baby is due in early August. Pregnancy is incredible… and it’s also an incredibly challenging time.
Promoting awareness and open discussion about mental health during and after pregnancy is so important — there is such a lot of stigma impacting on whether people feel able to speak out. It’s all too easy to perceive other peoples’ experiences as wholly positive —and to feel immensely guilty when dealing with anything other than the sunshine and rainbows that it looks like it’s supposed to be from the outside. Today is a day of reflection following a week of activity, if you’re interested catch up on #MaternalMHmatters.
On a physical health note, I definitely feel more tired these days, which explains in part my overdue update!
Thanks to @SABPDigital and in particular the design teams for a warm welcome to the team. It’s been a great couple of months so far.
