NHS England
NHS Test Digital - Delivering vital services during the pandemic to prevent and monitor the spread of COVID-19
NHS Test Digital's services provided vital test kit ordering and outbreak monitoring services to people at home and organisations - such as hospitals and care homes - during the pandemic.
In 2020, I was an Interaction Designer within the 'Report a COVID-19 test result' (opens in new tab) team. This service provides vital data about the spread of the virus in the general population as well as key public services like GP surgeries, hospitals and care homes.
In 2021, I was promoted to Senior Interaction Designer.
I oversaw the Interaction Design work on all the public-facing services within the programme, including 'Order COVID-19 rapid lateral flow tests' (opens in new tab) and 'Get a PCR test' (opens in new tab) and was responsible for assuring the standard of accessibility and usability of these services.
In 2022, I became Practice Lead for Interaction Design.
I was responsible for assuring the Design and Accessibility standards of the services, recruitment and onboarding, one to ones to support team members, training and forming/documenting design processes.
In 2020, I was an Interaction Designer within the 'Report a COVID-19 test result' (opens in new tab) team. This service provides vital data about the spread of the virus in the general population as well as key public services like GP surgeries, hospitals and care homes.
This service needed to go from Discovery to Live in 3 weeks during December 2020 to meet 10 Downing Street's pre-Xmas deadline as part of a mass public testing exercise.
By Day 3, I'd coded an end to end prototype. This was demoed to the Prime Minister at the end of the week as part of a presentation on the service.
'Report a COVID-19 test result' (opens in new tab) was successfully launched within 3 weeks before Christmas 2020. Lateral flow testing data from Care Home visitors was gathered from the service. This showed a significant number of care home visitors who'd tried to visit elderly residents while inadvernantly having an active Covid infection.
This early data showed the value of the service in providing strategic data when co-ordinated with a mass lateral flow testing exercise within healthcare, academic and residential settings.
Some key service statistics:
The 'Report a COVID-19 test result' (opens in new tab) includes a photo capture and upload process for rapid lateral flow test results to be read by AI technology.
This helps users with accessibility & cognitive needs to have confidence in the result of their Covid test, and receive the right guidance from the Government and NHS.
A paper was written on this service in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal.
More case studies about my time on Test and Trace will follow shortly.
I am currently working on this programme (dated July 2023).
