Monthnote: February 2024

This month I have been mostly trying to define how the NHS App will be different by the end of the year. Oh, and we will soon have a new minimum iOS version.

What does the future hold?

We have a solid roadmap and plan for the NHS App through to summer 2024, but after then things get a little more vague with a lot of stuff in the ‘maybe’ or ‘don’t know yet’ buckets. This is as you’d expect with agile delivery, but with the start of the new financial year approaching it felt like a good time to refresh and reflect on what we do know about the mid-to-long-term future.

(It’s also my job to a) know this, b) help define this, and c) put a narrative round this.)

I started speaking to NHS App teams to capture what they see as the priorities for their product areas. Some of the most promising proposals include addressing pain points on the login journey, improving the repeat prescription journey and unlocking new primary care message types.

My conversations with teams outside our programme have been even more illuminating. There is a lot of exciting work happening in national NHS digital services right now, and some of this is obviously dependent on the NHS App as a channel to reach logged-in users. You can expect to see some major improvements for screening, vaccinations, secondary care and proxy access in the not-too-distant future.

Our roadmap for integrating external third party services (online GP consultations, personal health records, messaging and secondary care) is more defined and transparent. We publish lists of the services currently integrated and those in the pipeline for integration.

Updating to newer OS

At some point in the not-too-distant future we are no longer going to support iOS version 15 or below.

This will affect about 0.3% of our active users. Half of those are on devices that are able to upgrade to iOS 15 (assuming they have the space with which to do so) but the other half will no longer be able to use the app.

The lower case ‘a’ is important here. They might no longer be able to use the app they downloaded from the App Store, but they should be able to continue to access NHS App services through the browser version of the NHS App.

The level of thought, care and attention that has gone into the plan for the affected users warms the cockles of my heart. We’ve completely reviewed the user journey for this kind of event. We’ve considered messaging, error screens, helpdesk responses and communications to the wider NHS — all for 0.3% of our users. It’s this kind of behaviour that separates the teams who care (and — let’s be honest — are sufficiently resourced to care) from the teams who don’t.

My cultural highlights of the month

• Various shows on NTS. I’ve been listening to NTS on and off for a few years, but recently I’ve been using it as my main source of music. If you’re not taken with what’s playing live it’s easy to stumble onto a primer for early UK hard psych (cc Dean Vipond), episodes on piano rap and guitar rap (cc @jukesie) and 5 hours of techno from 1992 (cc everyone).
• Polite Society. Joyous British comedy martial arts film.
• India v England. This Test series has been great fun. So many of the new or less experienced players have performed brilliantly: Tom Hartley, Shaoib Bashir, Dhruv Jurel, and especially Yashasvi Jaiswal.
• Wicked Little Letters. This British film feels like one of those family friendly Sunday afternoon period dramas, except that it has a lot of top-shelf swearing throughout. I laughed a lot.
• For All Mankind. I’m not sure about this series yet, but I am enjoying the portrayal of Apollo astronauts as per Tom Wolfe’s excellent book, The Right Stuff.