Weeknotes E37
Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working at the Department of Health and Social Care. Each week I’m going to keep a running update of the work I’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.
My current priority:
Supporting the Healthy Start private beta and a helping hand in the Healthy Start vitamins discovery
Some interesting and shareable things that happened this week. Other more mundane things also happened…
Vitamins discovery user research
We’ve been research mad recently with sessions all over the country, different user groups and this week I got to be a note taker again. To be deeply invested and listening to your users is a pleasure as well as being a necessity. I find it extremely stimulating and really enjoyed playing my part as colleague Sophie was being a pro-interviewer and I was listening in to the world of midwives and vitamins.
Chatting with PhD student
I sat down for a chat with a PhD student who is researching into the Healthy Start scheme. I will accept research, thought and opinion from all over the place if people are willing to give it. PhD student researched around 60 people and I heard about their findings and thoughts on the scheme. Healthy Start has a fascinating community revolving around it.
Also as a side note the student found us because of some of the work we are publically sharing. Our little map of uptake inspired them to get in touch.
New blog
Super colleague Isaac wrote a blog (with some tiny additions from moi). It’s a work of beauty.
Survey response experiment
We did a great experiment with our suppliers data sci colleagues in regards to a recent Healthy Start survey. They took anonymous chunk of free-text data (about 3,800 responses to 2 questions) and had zero knowledge of the scheme. Their goals:
- We want to extract meaningful insights that are statistically relevant for each question.
- Data Studio Goal: In a day, without previous knowledge of the scheme, giving the nature of the questions, we wanted to understand what the healthy start scheme is and what are the “pains and needs” of the users.
Team used text normalization, topic modeling & sentiment analysis (yes, I know there are drawbacks to these). Results were really interesting. Some insights that matched existing research and some less explored areas we can delve into. Feedback included:
- could the scheme allow vouchers to be used for shopping online
- scheme to have a card instead of a paper voucher
- increase the age limit of scheme
- increase the value of the voucher
- offer non-dairy alternative products
- make it easier to access the vitamins
Sentiment of the scheme was also really high (1200/1950 participants). Blog post about this coming soon.
Cottage industry of good practice
I’ve become a poster boy for Crown Commercial Service procurement of prepaid cards. Niche I know.
I keep on getting referred to by them to help commercial colleagues in other departments setup supplier days and onboarding days. I should really write a blog post about it so I don’t need to copy and paste emails.
NHSX
Was announced.
I’ve been giving my input on a number of areas to do with it. I continue to do so.
What I’ve been reading
- A diet to save the planet.
- I was there for this and it was fantastic, completely agree with the stop disempowering people principle.
- Article on expanding the sugar tax, “By the age of 10, the average child has exceeded the recommended level of sugar intake for an 18-year-old” - startling.
- Poverty, nutrition and its effect on health.
- Captive capital held by sufferers of Alzheimer’s in Japan. A phenomena the UK may face one day.
- New rival for Amazon Go. I continue to predict that a cashier-free store will be in the UK soon.
- Some good lessons about innovation and social change.
- A bill of rights for the use of ‘nudging’ for governments