Weeknotes s06e01

TL,DR: Fixing the basics. Making a difference. Shaping what’s next.

[W/C 01/06/2026]

Prologue

It’s been a long week, one of those where a lot of energy has gone into holding the line on things that aren’t quite where they need to be, while still trying to keep momentum on the bigger picture. Reflecting on it, this week has very much been about leaning in. Making sure we’re prioritising the right things, and not letting problems linger longer than they should.

Who did you talk to outside your organisation?

A few conversations this week that were particularly useful:

• VMO2 senior escalation call: This was an important one. We’ve had a number of ongoing concerns — call handling, escalation routes, general responsiveness, and the recent major incident impacting one of our sites, alongside continued WiFi challenges at THQ. It felt productive. We’ve agreed a more structured way of working, clearer governance, regular touchpoints, and better visibility of a customer service improvement plan. The key now is simple: does this translate into better outcomes? That’s what I’ll be watching closely over the next few weeks.
• Zscaler workshop: A really good technical session exploring what our future network could look like, particularly around branch connectors. It’s opened up some interesting thinking about how SD-WAN could look like for us in the future. It’s still early days, but it’s definitely one to consider in our mid-longer-term plans.
• Freshworks account team: Really insightful conversation around getting more from the platform. The potential integration with Tanium stood out and lots of opportunity there in terms of automation and improving how we operate day-to-day. We’re looking to bring them onsite to go deeper, and I also suggested creating an NHS Freshworks user group. There’s a real opportunity for Trusts to share how we’re using the platform and learn from each other.
• BridgeHead Software: An interesting discussion on legacy EPR data and in particular around what happens in prolonged outage scenarios and how we think about data as we move closer to an EPR re-procurement. Feels like an important part of the bigger EPR conversation that we’ll need to keep developing over time.

What would you have liked to do more of?

There’s a lot going on at the moment and rightly so, but it does mean that weeks can get pulled quite heavily into operational detail and escalation. Important work, but it can crowd out the space needed to think about enterprise architecture and where we are heading longer term. Need to be more deliberate about protecting time for strategic thinking with the team leads, even if it’s just carving out small, focused blocks. Otherwise, the risk is we become brilliant at reacting, but slower at shaping what comes next.

What do you wish you could have changed?

I would have liked to have got further, faster on some of the issues affecting staff, particularly WiFi at THQ and poor windows security patching UX. I know a lot of the underlying causes are complex with suppliers, infrastructure, legacy constraints. But the reality is that staff just experience the outcome, not the complexity behind it.

This week has been about stepping up the escalation and putting more structure around how we deal with those issues. The bit I’ll carry forward is the importance of not letting things drift. If something is impacting user experience at scale, it needs pace behind it.

What challenged me?

A few things stood out this week:

• Holding suppliers to account when performance isn’t where it needs to be.
• The continued complexity behind resolving WiFi issues at THQ, although we started work on implementing some workarounds.
• Patching not consistently delivering the end user experience we expect, hopefully we will crack this next week.

It’s that gap between what should be happening and what people are actually experiencing that’s the challenge. It’s also a reminder that having the right tools isn’t enough it’s about how well those tools are implemented, managed and how vendor changes are rolled out to us. Going into next week, the focus will be on getting underneath the root causes, and progressing solutions.

What did you enjoy?

Spending time with Jenny Rossle, our Service Desk Lead, and reviewing our service delivery metrics. It’s easy in our daily digital huddles to focus on issues and lose sight of the bigger picture. By nature issues are raised by exception. Stepping back and looking at the data told a much more balanced story. Over the last 12 months:

• We’ve consistently achieved 96–97% SLA resolution performance
• First-time fix rates are strong, generally sitting above 80%
• We’ve seen a sustained reduction in call volumes following some key infrastructure stablisation milestones earlier in the year

Some of this success is down to the hard work and dedication from our Support and Technology teams within Digital delivering on some challenging pieces of work on the Technology roadmap:

• Moving from Citrix to secure RDS for our EPR access. Yes our Citrix experience was not great for us, and no we didnt need the whole tech stack — no really, and very costly and a vendor that felt like it was no longer aligned with the NHS. Secure modern RDS solution now does what we need securely for a fraction of the cost and a massive support call volume reduction also.
• Migration away from legacy network core infrastructure. The core network was the last piece of a network migration that took a while to complete. We had paused for almost a year so work out the complexities, remove legacy configuration and tech debt before actually moving towards full cutover to the new core network and a decommission of the old. This piece of work was delivered through the dedication of our Network Team working closely with VMO2 colleagues.
• Ongoing work to reduce technical debt within Active Directory and move more towards cloud. Essential piece of work and we are still doing more in this space, but some of the complexities removed and more importantly ensuring we understand dependencies and move towards more modern configuration.

It was a really good reminder to take stock and call out what is working well and what we have done to get there, not just what needs fixing. There’s a huge amount of effort behind those numbers, and the impact is real.

Also this week, Richard Vasey (Digital Programme Director) shared some really positive early indicators from our PEP (Patient Engagement Portal) / NHS App Project:

• 72% increase in patients reached via the NHS App since February
• Around 60% of messages delivered via the app
• 28% reduction in SMS usage in May
• Over 1,700 SMS messages avoided overall

More importantly, more patients are actually engaging with their messages, which is what really matters.

Also a real highlight this week was catching up on the clinical coding audit results. The preliminary outcomes are really strong:

• Primary Diagnosis accuracy: 94%
• Secondary Diagnosis accuracy: 91%

That level of consistency doesn’t happen by chance, it reflects a huge amount of focus, quality, and discipline from the team. A big thank you to Matt Wheal and everyone involved. It’s a great example of the kind of work that often goes unseen day-to-day but has a real impact on quality, reporting, and ultimately patient care.

The EPS rollout in particular is worth calling out: 180+ staff trained, 180 devices upgraded, 2,000+ prescriptions issued digitally within five weeks. A real shift away from paper and a big step forward for both staff and patient experience.Was super pleased with our Digital Apps, Systems and Training teams working alongside the EPS Project Team for a successful Trust-wide rollout of EPS (Electronic Prescription Service) This is a big milestone for prescribing within community services.

What did you achieve?

• Attended the Exec Huddle on Monday as Monique’s deputy.
• Attended a joint GMMH/PCFT EPR Options Workshop.
• Project team discusion around resourcing requirements and planning for electronic obeservations (eObs) implementation.
• Participated in a number of GMMH/PCFT strategy workshops, the aim of which was to look at identifying areas of collaboration to progress the Joint Digital Strategy.
• Work underway on THQ Data Centre UPS replacement following the recent failure, preparatory work completed this week. Looking forward to th reviewing the full plan at TDA next week.
• Attended EPMA Sub-Group meeting. Another successful EPMA Ward go-live by Digital and Pharmacy Project team, keeping us on track towards July/August, we are getting very close to completion.
• Attended a meeting with Simon Sandhu, Chief Medical Officer/Caldicot Guardian, Nichola Tamannis, Chief Financial Officer/SIRO and Paul Bryne Head of IG/DPO to discuss the agenda for next week’s Information Governance Assurance Group and also discussion around reducing the Agenda scope as DSPT and Cyber updates are already predominantly covered within the Digital Board.
• Sprint review with Team Leads, the session was lead by Nathan who does a fab job of curation and leading as our sprint lead. We had noticeably fewer blockers than we’ve had in our recent 2 week sprints. Working in agile sprints has been a real game changer for us.
• Preparation and review of papers for Digital Board next week.

What did you learn?

A few reflections this week:

• Governance really matters, particularly with suppliers
• User experience is still the best measure of whether something is working
• The investment we’ve made earlier is now paying off

We’ve also continued conversations this week, building on discussions from last week and input from NHSE this week around how the cyber threat landscape is continuing to evolve at pace. Particularly with the rise of AI-driven capabilities. The consistent message, both locally and across the industry, is that:

• The speed and scale of attacks is increasing, what once took months and years to exploit now takes hours and minutes. The dawn of more frequent patching is upon us and that is something we need to think about as it emerges.
• The barrier to entry for attackers is significantly reducing.
• Phishing remains the dominant initial attack vector and doing the basics still prevents a large proportion of opportunist attack vectors. Which reinforces the importance of awareness, training and regular exercising. Alongside continuing to get the fundamentals right eg. visibility, control, and patching.

What are you looking forward to next week?

A busy but important week ahead:

• Digital Sprint Planning for the next two-week sprint
• Digital Board
• Information Governance Assurance Group
• Greater Manchester ICS Cyber Special Interest Group
• EPRR Strategic Group, where I’ll be presenting on DSPT essential functions and phishing resilience
• Catch-ups with DELL and 8×8 account teams
• Capital Planning Group meeting
• Product demos with Imprivata (Model Ward) and Risk Ledger (3rd party risk management)
• A session with one of our clinicians on an early-stage AI/LLM psychiatric documentation tool. Very much an “art of the possible” discussion

Epilogue

Looking back, this week has been about getting into the detail where it matters, while still keeping an eye on where we’re heading.

There’s a lot going on:

• Stabilising core services
• Strengthening supplier relationships
• Continuing delivery
• Exploring what comes next

The priority remains simple, focus on what has the biggest impact for staff and patients, and keep moving forward.

Originally published at http://jwsingh.wordpress.com on June 7, 2026.