NHSCitizen on tour at expo14NHS


This blog post is going to be a quick one – I promise! I’m writing it on the train on the way back from #expo14NHS – a two day exhibition and conference about innovation and change in the NHS. It was the perfect place to launch NHS Citizen!

You can see what we have been up to here.

We’ve asked all of the project team to collected their initial impressions from the event and then we will also be reflecting on the events we held at expo in more detail over the next couple of weeks as we design the next ‘sprint’ of activity for NHSCitizen. This is part of our desire to ‘think in public’ and so we would love to also hear from people who connected with NHSCitizen in some way at Expo to also share their reflections.

So – here we go:

  1. Once again it was a joy to work with Olivia, Nagina and the rest of the team at NHS England and also with the rest of the NHS Citizen team – thank you all.
  2. The community zone was a fabulous space for informal interactions and a number of people talked about the fact that it worked really well. It was less good for some of the more structured sessions we ran (like the Assembly test) where the informality worked but it would have been good to have been able to move stuff around a bit more. Learning for next year!
  3. We had lots of really powerful conversations with a range of people who have issues of access and represent some of the hidden voices in the NHS system. These ranged from the trans representatives who spoke at the launch, the the team from Change who spoke at the Assembly as well as a number of people speaking up for rural communities, older people and a range of other groups. We need to make sure that we work with these groups on the design of NHS Citizen and this needs to be a priority for the next stage of the work. If we don’t involve these groups in the design we have missed the chance to involve them in the system when its in flight
  4. That being said – one of the best things about the assembly meeting was the way it brought lots of different voices together around a particular issue – I wouldn’t want to lose that.  There is a delicate balance here which is as much about the model of democracy that we work with as it is about the actual interactions in the spaces
  5. We may need a pressure valve – lots of people have something that they desperately need to have heard and we may need a forum for this to clear the way for more deliberative conversations
  6. How do we work with the people who choose to participate at the same time as holding the space and experience open to people who are not able or do not choose to participate?
  7. Skeptics and critical friends are vital – but its hard to work with cynics
  8. Its an amazing feeling to connect to so many people who want to do things differently – but we have to make sure that we translate this to action or we will lose the moment
  9. We need to be meticulous in capturing our promises (and those of the board) and intentions and always close these off properly
  10. Real listening is a skill that many of us lack (I include myself!) – how we help this to become the default behaviour of NHSCitizen?
  11. I want to make sure that we tackle the question of online/offline connectors for the next phase of work
  12. We also need to tackle the local/national tension for NHSCitizen – at least as far as working out what the question is
  13. The mapping approach worked – we need to make some tweaks to this and then set it free for people to start generating more detailed maps. More on this in another post as well as some thoughts on participation vs surveillance
  14. The more I get to see of @victoriabetton the better – can’t wait to come back to Leeds and to talk more!
  15. There is a lot of detailed work to do in the next phase – we have to make sure that we communicating these effectively so that we don’t lose people on the way
  16. How do we make enough time to do things properly but also make progress fast enough to build momentum?

I think thats it – or rather I am sure that there will lots of other things but this is the initial download.

I said more structured stuff to come and please comment if this sparks any reflections in you.

And thank you – I had a fabulous couple of days talking to some amazing people

 

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