Supporting NHSX to develop national digital strategies

The challenge

Digital technologies have the potential to improve care across the whole of the NHS and realise the ambition for 21st century world-class healthcare for patients.

Every month sees more than 16 million interactions in community pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, ambulance and community services. But often these interactions are not supported by the digital advances seen elsewhere in the NHS.

NHSX needed to develop a five year digital strategy for these sectors and an extensive programme of stakeholder engagement.

Our approach

Kaleidoscope partnered with the NHS Transformation Unit to deliver a full programme of stakeholder engagement across five sectors to inform the development of the NHSX Digital PODAC (community pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, ambulance and community services) strategy.

First, we developed a set of practical and compelling national digital strategies across each of the PODAC sectors evidenced by a wide range of stakeholder insights.

Then we built a broad network of strengthened and sustainable stakeholder relationships to provide long term social capital for PODAC digital implementation. Our support included:

• delivery of desk-based review of digital developments across the sectors
• wide-ranging engagement activities to seek views and input to identify key needs, priorities and recommendations
• focused workshops to test and challenge the recommendations and implementation plans
• authorship of the sector strategies, working collaboratively with NHSX PODAC sector leads
• support for stakeholder management.

To ensure the widest possible representation, stakeholders were drawn from NHSX, NHS Digital, NHS England and NHS Improvement, staff representative bodies, sector membership organisations, individual practitioners, patients and patient representative bodies, system leads and digital champions.

During the course of this work, we engaged with more than 500 key stakeholders nationally through one-to-one and group meetings, bespoke workshops and online feedback.

Outcomes

We successfully produced the NHSX Digital PODAC strategy, setting out actions to significantly improve the digital capacity and capabilities within community pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, ambulance and community services.

Our approach ensured that the digital strategy was closely aligned to the clinical vision for each sector. It was also a sustainable model to build relationships with key stakeholders so they continued to be involved in planning and implementing the priorities.

The strategy was endorsed by NHS England clinical leadership for each sector and the strategy underpinned a case for investment for the programme.