Weeknotes Feb 7th-11th 2022

It feels like much longer than a week since my last weeknotes and since I shared my reflections of saying farewell to NHSX. The past five days have been varied and busy, especially as I’ve been trying to get things sorted before a week of annual leave.

What’s gone well

A culture of caring: We’re continuing to grow our team to support the increasing interest in social care digitisation, and this week interviewed for some leadership roles in our programme team. One thing that struck me was the tone that was set by answers to the first question ‘why do you want this job, and what do you want to achieve?’. We have a strong culture emerging in our joint DHSC/ NHSE team of user-centredness and collaboration, and I want to hear how people think the work we do matters and what they think their role is making the world a better place (or at least in improving the quality of services).

What’s been hard

Being open to feedback: It’s always a bit uncomfortable inviting people to critique work that you know isn’t as good as it could be, but it’s something that I encourage my team to do to add value early in the process. This week we took one of our discovery projects to a service assessment workshop, facilitated by the CDDO. I know how helpful these can be from my days heading up the digital spend controls team for health, but it’s been a while since I was on the assessed side.

Over the past 12 weeks we’ve been exploring how we can best support local government to deliver the charging reforms – to put in place the new cap of £86k on care costs and track how quickly people are metering toward this cap. Our scope was to set out the technology requirements but the discovery has also given us many important insights that have fed into the development of wider policy, and also plenty of suggestions for how we could be more joined up with other teams. A key principle of all our work is to do with rather than to so we have a lot of engagement to do, and we need to make sure we’ve got the team in place with the skills and capacity to get this right.

What I’ll do more of

Working in the open: I’ve been thinking about how we do more to work in the open. We still exchange way too many emails as a team where we could be using Slack. One to pick up again when I get back from leave. I’m also thinking about how we work more in the open and share our work with other teams in the NHS transformation directorate, including NHS Digital teams.