{"id":3610,"date":"2026-10-01T08:18:59","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T08:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=3610"},"modified":"2026-10-01T10:34:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T10:34:53","slug":"weeknote-10-6-months-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/weeknote-10-6-months-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Weeknote 10: 6 months in"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This week was the start of month 6 as Head of UCD in Digital Screening in NHS England. Here are some things I am thinking about:<\/p>\n

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  1. The NHS is not one place<\/a>, it’s a network of businesses and trusts held together by a common understanding of risk.<\/strong> The closest I ever came to this was in banking but it’s still not quite the same. Almost every piece of design work is deeply shaped by reputational, clinical and cybersecurity risks. What it does to design teams, I think, is that it creates a sense of unease about making decisions. Every decision has to be highly collaborative and the team have to be able to hold their nerve as they head towards the next decision because something could happen to slow or stop things entirely. A game of snakes and ladders in other words.<\/li>\n
  2. Your patience will be rewarded.<\/strong> I can see why people stay in the NHS for a long time, it rewards loyalty. To be able to see something over the line is pretty great. I’m only a bystander to the HPV self testing work<\/a> one of the teams is trialing but seeing the amount of press and uptake has been wonderful. There’s not a lot of modern digital design work that feels that impactful. Much digital work is moving boxes around on the internet, this is helping someone make a decision that might help them live longer.<\/li>\n
  3. Opinions are necessary<\/strong>. I’m in a leadership group that advises all 15 teams every fortnight (amongst other duties). We talk to product leads about ‘having an opinion’ all the time. What this means for designers is that you have to help pick a lane, a path, a way forward. If you don’t know which to pick, you probably haven’t asked enough questions or don’t know enough about the problem. Sharing ‘work in progress’ is fine for a while, but after a few months, if all I see is a ‘could be’ blueprint without enough operational detail or a ‘options’ map, my confidence wavers. I start to doubt you’ve done the dirty job of getting close enough to the detail. And if my confidence wavers, I hate to think what clinical colleagues will feel.<\/li>\n
  4. Asking for help gets you there faster.<\/strong> This is very hard for new designers who have never worked in the NHS before but we are lucky to have profession leads who have been around for a long time. Even when there is poor to no information, there are always relationships to lean on. It takes some humility to ask for help from others when you join a project, but it’s the only way to go about it in an institution that is constantly shifting.<\/a> Your prior experience and technical skills may be helpful but it’s no substitute for existing relationships. We’re welcoming new colleagues into the team<\/a> and instead of pointing people to resources they probably won’t read, I point people at each other. Creating good relationships helps with almost everything in life and it’s no exception for work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Onwards, together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This week was the start of month 6 as Head of UCD in Digital Screening in NHS England. Here are some things I am thinking about: The NHS is not one place, it’s a network of businesses and trusts held together by a common understanding of risk. The closest I ever came to this was… Continue reading Weeknote 10: 6 months in<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeknotes","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-We","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3610"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3615,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3610\/revisions\/3615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}