NHS Digital was the national information and technology partner for health and social care system in England. It was responsible for designing, developing, and operating national IT and data services for the NHS before the introduction of NHS England in 2023.

The National Record Locator (NRL) is a service which allows health or social care workers to find and access patient information shared by other health and social care organisations across England, to support the direct care of a patient.

During my time at Answer Digital I worked with NHS Digital on the NRL (National Record Locator) service amongst other projects.

The end customers of the NRL were the organisations within the NHS who would be ultimately buying the service for the benefit of their end-users, such as trusts and ambulance services, emergency wards and of course patients in need of emergency care.

The initiative helps to link ambulance services to patient records anywhere in the country to help provide the right care at the point of first contact.

I was the Lead UX designer for Answer Digital when working with NHS Digital to help create the National Record Locator.

It was my job to help translate the complex users and structural challenges in to something that could be understood by decision makers at the ambulance service and health trusts.

They were our most important clients and ultimately the ones who would dictate if the NRL was a success.

Each trust and ambulance service had devolved power and budgets to buy products and service to suit their patient’s needs best.

The project involved user and desk research to understand both the users and the complex structures governing UK health trusts and ambulance services throughout all regions.

It required service design skill to map out how a patient care would be delivered end-to-end. 

Finally UX/UI Design skill to create the interfaces which would be used by staff either end of the service, adding and viewing patient records.

I worked closely with developers, SMEs and end users to design and iterate how the NRL would work in practice.

The project team was made up of NHS and Answer Digital staff, 

We were tasked with delivering the NRL in to the NHS, across all ambulance services, health trusts and NHS Partnerships across the UK.

The NRL’s initial objective was to connect critical patient information at the moment frontline NHS staff needed it.

For example, providing ambulance services with patient mental health records in order to allow them to provide the appropriate type and level of care when they come in to contact with that person.

It uses the NHS spine to allow ambulance services in one area of the country e.g. Newcastle, to view a patient's records that may be owned by a health trust in say London.

This in turn allows other frontline services such as the police, A&E, social services and other to focus on other forms of care.

Saving lives and millions of pounds in used up hours and resource for all the aforementioned services. 

The project was essentially all about exposing information from one end point to another via the NHS ‘spine’. Patients records are owned and maintained by the separate trusts.

Our job was to sell this initiative. 

I created user journey maps and service blueprints to help illustrate the involvement of various actors and the end to end service.

In conjunction, I designed the UI for the various handheld and desktop screens of the different actors, such as ambulance staff on tablets of desktop view at mental health trusts.

I also created the various design artefacts used at roadshows and workshops which would ultimately help convince and gain crucial buy-in form large NHS Trusts and Ambulance Services such as LAS (London Ambulance Service) and the NWAS (North West Ambulance Service).

• Improved integration of care pathways across providers, including timely communication and collaboration between acute trusts, mental health providers, ambulance services, primary care, social care, public health (drug/alcohol services) and the voluntary sector.

• Patients spend less time in an inappropriate setting like Accident and Emergency (A&E) or police custody.

• Supporting more accurate understanding of local populations, allowing services to be designed more effectively around individual needs.

• Preventing unnecessary conveyances to A&E by giving paramedics more information about the individual when making clinical decisions.

The initiative helps to link patient records anywhere in the country (which wasn’t available before). 

This helps to provide the right care at the point of contact so it can be triaged correctly with the best care for each patient provided, be it mental health, end of life or other.

They helped to inform the design and iterate both the NRL as a system to use as well any newly designed patient records in terms of what they should contain to be most effective, as well as how and what would be displayed when. 

The initiative went on to win the public sector award for innovation in 2019 by Digital Leader 100 ahead of NHS 111 service.