Colleagues and myself have been thinking about how to make the tech ecosystem in the NHS more sustainable. This is an update on what we’ve been doing.

Collaboration

In the last blog post I wrote that over a year ago:

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.

Well the individual in question was a smart cookie called Ben. He’s been thinking, writing and working on this subject for a while (for example a post he did back in early 2019 ). He’s also the person that has been integral in greening digital communities and works in health & care. I knew he would be the first person I’d seek out to collaborate with if I ever was doing any work in this realm. So that’s what I did.

Workshop

As this is a side hustle and I have other expectations on my time I decided to opt for a full day, co-located with Ben to get the ball rolling. I am a fan of inceptions before kicking off work and this felt like it needed the same treatment. A day for us both to build shared understanding of the problem and the scope of what we could do.

Agenda

Prior to getting there I stuck together bits and bobs so I could facilitate the day. This is what we got upto…

Context and how did we get here

I went through what I thought the problem area is and articulated where I think we sit in this space. I also explained how the idea was pitched and where this task emerged from. Ben shared some of his own slides that he had presented on the importance and scale of the problem and we talked about the topic. Unsurprisingly we both think it’s incredibly important!

How might we statements

I really like how might we statements and decided to frame the challenge using them.

My initial view is we had the knowledge and influence to investigate firstly:

How might we create a greener, more environmentally friendly tech ecosystem within the NHS?

I didn’t stop there. I understood that we couldn’t do it all so we may choose to think about an alternative challenge such as:

How might we give constructive advice & feedback to people & teams to make the NHS more sustainable?

After more discussion we started to rethink. Just making things a bit better is quite frankly not appreciating the scale of the problem. So we began to sway more towards pitching the work in terms of a climate resilient NHS rather than an organisation that is tinkering around the edges.

For me this means that we have an NHS that will adapt to the effects of climate change (you cannot disentangle a warming planet and rising health needs ) so it can continue to provide health and care in a warmer world, while also reshaping itself so it is no longer a contributor to the problem.

That requires radical innovation. Thankfully it’s what NHSX was setup to do.

Opportunity & what people need from us

We next discussed what a fantastic opportunity we have with interested parties willing to listen. It’s not always been a topic that people have had as much time for.

We discussed why NHSX should be involved - touching on it’s role to set national policies, set standards, transform health & care and also its governance role in all things digital, data and tech.

We also did a little task about what will people need to see & hear from us as we progress. It’s always good to think about your audience.

Scale

Next up was a chance for us to discuss how wide our remit in digital, data and tech could stretch in this space. For me it touches on many areas including (but not limited to);

• are we buying sustainable hardware/tech/devices/software
• do we have sustainable data retention policies so we don’t need to store data we don’t need anymore unnecessarily
• how do reduce duplication of services, products and data so we have less waste
• how do we affect human behaviour with the tech people use (e.g. turning off the screen when not in use)
• are we encouraging reuse and not throwing out tech unnecessarily therefore extending its life
• are we building and maintaining services that think about sustainability (e.g. reducing the amount and size of images on your web page) - 17 tips here if you want more
• are we designing services with the lens of sustainability in mind (e.g. lets use remote consultations instead of asking people to drive unnecessarily for a face to face appointment if we know that it’s safe and achieves the same outcomes for patients and clinicians)
• is the infrastructure of our services as sustainable as it could be

I know that’s a rag tag list but gives you a sense that there are many angles you can take towards the problem. All of them are interesting, all are probably valid but they’d still require ruthless prioritisation.

Stakeholder mapping

We know that we aren’t alone in this space and others have influence and expertise in these areas. So we spent a chunk of time mapping who else is doing what, so we could better get to grips with who might be good collaborators and avoid duplicating the work of others.

More how might we’s

In the second half of the day after pulling apart our views on the topic we spent some time creating some new how might we statements. This was essentially a first stab at trying to reduce scope of what we could work on and prioritise. By the end of the day we had a list of ideas about areas that someone could invest in that we thought solved real problems.

We also discussed how to articulate these ideas and talked through the idea of using product/design briefs.

Chats

We didn’t do all of this in isolation. By the end of the day we had been in two calls. One was with a DEFRA colleague who is super knowledgeable and we want more involved so they can add the cross-government perspective of what is going on and what we can piggyback on. Then we also talked to some great people thinking about the same problem but from a trust level perspective and asking for advice on where to begin.

The fact that people are already seeking support and advice on this topic indicates to me that there is demand awaiting to be supplied. I can’t imagine that it’s going away either, more and more people will begin asking the same questions and without coordination they might fumble around before working out a way that scratches their itch.

Goodbyes and to-do’s

By the end of the day my head was full and we had a backlog of things to do and prepare. The day was fantastic and put us on the right path forward.

What next?

Unsurprisingly we didn’t get through everything we’d have liked to (would of loved to do a first round of prioritisation if we had time!). So there was still a bit of cleanup work to do post-workshop. Here is some stuff I got up to in the following days of the workshop:

• setting up some future sessions
• sharing resources
• creating some new resources and templates
• writing up things from the day
• speaking with extra people

I had two events on the cards that would be relevant coming up very soon after the workshop - UK Gov Camp and One Green Gov. More from those in my next post! (this will also include interesting announcements! )

Further reading

Interesting extras for those who may want to know more:

• Chris Adams does a lot of work in this area and has a mailing list. Might be worth joining if you enjoyed this!
• if you want to read about inception days and how to kick off work then I recommend Will M’s post about it.
• Green web foundation
• Reducing carbon in the digital realm presentation

Previous posts

If you would like to find out more about why I got interested in this subject then check out my previous blog post.