Helping build the NHS design community
Fostering a caring and supportive place where people can thrive, and deliver services that work for everyone
As practice lead for design at NHS Digital, part of my role was to ensure everyone had access to the training, resources and peer support needed to make them effective in their role, and to feel part of a supportive community.
When most designers were assigned to a multidisciplinary team, often distributed across more than one location, it can get lonely, so we encouraged everyone to contribute ideas and questions to a shared Slack channel. Likewise, we ran fortnightly design community sessions for people to bring problems, or to show what they’re working on.
Coaching new talent
At the time, NHS Digital had a successful user-centred design graduate scheme, and we made sure to bring graduates right into the heart of work, treating them as peers, not just trainees. Doing this gave new designers confidence, and provided important opportunities for more established designers to become coaches. This was a successful period in improving the pipeline of new talent into the NHS design profession.
Making the profession more diverse
I believe the design industry in general has a diversity problem, with routes into the profession for people from different backgrounds being very limited. At NHS Digital, I worked with design colleagues and HR to pilot new methods of recruitment aimed at broadening the diversity of candidates applying for design roles. You can read more about the work we did in this blog post, and a follow-up a year later.