On Wednesday myself and some smart colleagues sat down and made plans about how to make the tech ecosystem in the NHS more sustainable. We will do more work but first I want to write up how we ended up in a small meeting room in Leeds hashing out plans.
Story so far
I’ve been playing around with the Pixar format of storytelling. So indulge me as I potter through the format.
Once upon a time…
I was doing my thing helping the Department and Health and Social Care to create and run great public services. It was summer 2018. I was (and still am) a product manager and naturally love knowing all the ins and outs of the things I work on.
Everyday…
I would be working with my team, spending time understanding users, chatting with stakeholders, unblocking things, prioritising, giving advice to other teams, sometimes do a bit of facilitation and often offer opinions and be curious all in the name of iteratively improving services. We also had the responsibility of assuring what others in the world of health and care were building and buying. This sometimes came in the form of leading a service assessment.
One day…
I was searching for a write up of a service assessment and stumbled upon something very interesting. I noticed that another colleague in the public sector had asked a team a question that would stump me and just about anyone else I knew working in a multidisciplinary team.
They asked about the environmental impact of the service.
I read that and tried to imagine myself sitting in a room, responsible for a product/service and trying to formulate an answer and I didn’t get very far. I considered metrics & data I might have or the qualitative evidence available to me but nothing adequately answered the question.
Because of that…
I wanted to know more and potentially have an answer if ever asked.
Cue serendipity. I was at a show and tell and a guest speaker began talking about sustainability and tech. There was even a quiz. They also worked in the NHS. Immediately after I got in touch.
At the same time I was working with colleagues on revamping a service called Healthy Start. Among some of the choices to make the service better we were considering replacing sending lots and lots of paper vouchers (used to exchange for fruit, veg, milk and infant formula) with prepaid cards. The team had evidence from a discovery and alpha phase why this approach was better but I couldn’t answer if these decisions would be environmentally advantageous.
I knew the question could be deep & messy. Measuring it would be tricky. Would we;
- focus on the impact of plastic over paper
- or how about all the energy required to make the service tick (servers? not using energy on printing? etc)
- how about the carbon footprint of each email we send?
- or the effect of lots more data on users that we’d collect and retain
- or the impact of people being able to use cards in more shops than they could the paper vouchers. Which means they may not need to travel as far as they would of to reach a specific store. It was tricky but still very interesting.
I asked if others knew an answer, I read a lot and asked around for help (thinking it could be a really fun little side hustle or task for someone if they had more capacity than me). I am not sure I ever got an answer that satisfied me.
I kept on attending a little community of interest group about greening digital. I had other chats throughout 2019 on the subject with people around the public sector and outside of gov. I attended things like the Responsible Tech conference which had a few mentions of the topic & I continued to read around the subject.
Until finally…
Our first 2020 prioritisation meeting occurred in our small team. A chance to talk through the bulging backlog of teams/services that have requested help or there is an opportunity to get involved with and make an impact. This time round I felt an urge to pitch an idea myself, something that doesn’t happen in our team. Perhaps it was the beginning of a new decade that spurred me on, an increasing entrepreneurial spirit in me with a dash of my colleague Zuz encouraging me to actually pitch it.
The first iteration of what I pitched questioned…
How might we create a more environmentally friendly tech ecosystem within the NHS?
I asked for some time so that I could scope out what would be needed to work on this outcome more permanently.
The pitch honestly didn’t quite go as expected. I sort of thought it would spark an interesting discussion but ultimately we’re very busy and other demands would be prioritised. In fact after a good discussion I got way more encouragement to keep progressing then I anticipated. It ended up with me pitching the idea (in a structure not dissimilar to a design/product brief) to a snr figure and fast forward 24 hours and I had an email in my inbox saying thumbs up, go crack on and scope it out.
Sidenote: Entrepreneurial culture
I’m genuinely delighted that NHSX has the culture that internal ideas can be nurtured and encouraged. Tons of credit to those people who encouraged the idea and then gave it the necessary thumbs up so I could dedicate a smidgen of my time to it. It fills me with excitement that in the future my colleagues can pitch wonderfully valuable endeavours to those who lead NHSX and we will deliver on them.
What happened next?
Fortunately lots of my work is building teams, prioritising and scoping work. I also had the small community of practice to piggyback on to help form plans. So I immediately got in touch with someone who knows more than me and we began hustling. As I sit here it’s been 8 days since I looked in my inbox and there was snr sign off to dig further into this. Stuff has happened.
In my next post I’m going to share what went down in Leeds and reflections on what next.
Further reading
Interesting news stories in the past few days that are relevant for those interested (especially if we reframe the issue to How might we make a more climate resilient NHS?);