The People Powered Results team worked in partnership with NHSX to design, test and rapidly deploy a range of mechanisms to listen to those at the frontline of our healthcare system, and find out how they were rapidly adapting to working in a crisis environment whilst maintaining the delivery of key services.
The team set out to help NHSX to start to identify and understand:
- People’s experiences of shifting to new (digital and remote) ways of working during the start of the pandemic.
- The challenges and anticipated barriers to sustaining new practices.
- Emergent good practice, that can be built upon beyond the initial crisis.
The team gathered learning and insights about what digital transformation happened during the early days of the pandemic and what helped and hindered this.
Themes included: Operational issues such as policy, resource flows and governance; Technical issues like access to hardware and the confidence and skills to use digital/remote tools; and Cultural elements such as collaboration, mindsets and new behaviours to support a shift to digital.
These insights from the frontline informed a series of recommendations to NHSX to shape their support to the system, build upon emergent good practice and mitigate risks and blockers.