Why accessible design is good design/in /by

Josh Healey, User-Centred Design Lead for the Register with a GP surgery service, explains how redesigning the first page of the service made it more accessible for everyone – and how they created a framework to measure impact.

General practitioners (GPs) play an important role in our communities. GPs treat common medical conditions, refer patients to hospitals and act as the first place many go to for health and wellbeing advice. This is why it is so important that everyone can register with and see a GP when they need to.

Using meningitis pictures and video on 111 online/in /by

Paul Pod, Interaction Designer in the NHS 111 online team, explains how they have improved information about meningitis symptoms by adding multimedia content to triage questions.

When people use NHS 111 online, they usually have an urgent medical problem and they want to know what to do and where to go to get it sorted as quickly as possible. As designers, we spend all our time developing our understanding of users and thinking about how to make our service as accessible as possible.

What’s so great about the new National Care Records Service?/in /by

Locum pharmacist Faraaz Hussain describes his experience of using the new National Care Records Service.

I spend part of my week in a hospital setting and part as a locum in community pharmacies. The Summary Care Record application (SCRa) has always been an indispensable tool in this work, allowing quick and secure access to clinical information, but it can be tricky to access when moving between sites for locum clinicians like me.

In December 2022, I was approached by the Summary Care Record application team at NHS England to test out the National Care Records Services (NCRS), the successor to the SCRa. This is some of what I have found out.

Our new approach to migrating Spine to the cloud/in /by

Mark Burton, Lead Delivery Manager for the Spine Futures programme, explains why we’re accelerating the migration of Spine services into the cloud and why we need NHS organisations and healthcare suppliers to support the move.

In the decade since the NHS Spine was launched, digital health and care services have become significantly larger, much more complex and more central to NHS provision. The Spine platform provides critical healthcare infrastructure and we must modernise to keep up with the demands being placed on it.

What does good look like for APIs?/in /by

Matthew Firth describes our best practice policies around APIs – and how the most important one is not about the technical aspects of the work.

For the past 3 years, we have been on a mission to make integration easier within the NHS for people building healthcare technology.

Clinical trials get faster/in /by

For International Clinical Trials Day, James Gray, NHS DigiTrials Service Delivery Manager, talks about the new Feasibility Self-Service tool that drastically cuts the time it takes researchers to find out if there are enough potential participants for their clinical trial.

“In the time it takes to make a coffee.”

That was the challenge we set ourselves early in the creation of the NHS DigiTrials Feasibility Self-Service tool. And it was a big one: it meant giving users the ability to securely interrogate national datasets containing millions and millions of records in less than 5 minutes.

An easy way to register with a GP surgery/in /by

Dr Shanker Vijay, GP and Digital First Lead for London, explains why he is championing the national ‘Register with a GP surgery’ service and talks about improvements to the service.

It should be quick and simple for a patient to register with a GP surgery, but often it isn’t. Having worked in many GP surgeries, I’ve seen both patients and practice staff struggle with the process, leading to a poor experience for all. This can vary from patients being daunted when faced with dated, confusing and lengthy paper registration forms to busy practice staff having to find the time to deal with new registrations amongst all their other tasks.