The 5 Points of our Manifesto

1. We look to NHS care teams as our leaders of digital design

We need to change our culture and flip it from top-down tech to empowering clinical teams and putting them in the driving seat, as the people that will need to use a digital tool to care for patients. There are large opportunities to improve the experience and efficiency of NHS care, and we need to find better ways of putting clinical teams in the driving-seat and letting them experiment and adapt to find them.

2. We listen to feedback

NHS staff should be able to feed back easily, honestly and openly about any IT system they use to care for patients, confident that this will be collected, shared, interpreted and acted on. Solutions and iterations should involve the people using them at all stages to achieve a quality digital experience. Like central government mandates the sharing of user-feedback data.

3. We achieve a user experience with every digital solution that NHS clinicians can work with

NHS clinical software is too often below a reasonable minimum standard in terms of the experience clinical teams are left facing on a daily basis. We want to work together to develop and raise standards for user's experience of digital tools, and support them with better assessments of and decisions around this during digital delivery. Ultimately, every clinical solution should achieve an acceptable user experience for clinicians. When we deploy or change software, we should be paying attention to time costs and frustration (what we call ‘clinical drag’) as well as safety and data quality. We need to find better ways to check and act on this across the software lifecycle for our NHS services.

4. We will bring the NHS into the open, modern computing era

Open source and modular components have reduced the cost and complexity of building and adapting great software, while simultaneously creating standardisation and familiarity. The NHS is missing the benefits from these industry conventions, and we need to change that story, so that digital systems can keep up with the often rapid changes and evolving requirements of care teams. In practice, this means looking at a clinician's whole experience of digital working together to support them in their roles, rather than an obsessive focus on discrete point solutions.

5. We shift control from Big IT to NHS care teams

We will support the NHS to develop common contract clauses and standard mechanisms to shift the power from large and sometimes unresponsive big IT suppliers, and empower clinical care teams in their place. Across pharma, medical devices and clinical services, the NHS has used collective bargaining effectively to secure good deals and responsive market provision - and we can do it for digital too. Some requirements are best built as APIs or common modular solutions which everyone can use irrespective of their chosen systems - for example electronic Fit Notes or GOV.UK style functionality. Intellectual property should always remain fully owned by the NHS.