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 full care 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 providing care teams with the space, time and skills to explore and adapt to realise them.

Where this means changing the way we contract, manage, or work with our IT suppliers, we do so. Where this means opening up our products and solutions to respond to the designs and working patterns of care teams, we do so. Where this means contributing to changes in national architectures, international standards and at-scale approaches to digital delivery, we do so.

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. Not all requests or problems will be able to be solved, or resolved quickly, but its vital we hear them and their importance in the first place.

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 develop the capabilities of digital teams in the NHS

The skill-sets, ways of working, and team capabilities to work with technologies have improved over recent years, but are still a way off where they need to be. Our group and forum will work to understand where digital teams can be strengthened both in terms of discrete skills that are under-represented such as design, product management and front-end development - as well as ways of working across digital teams that NHS peers can learn from. We will collectively work to share good practices, develop each other as a community of digitally-focused NHS staff, and engage with national decision-makers around the evolution of digital skills and ways of working across the NHS.