Breast Cancer Screening

Designing a clinically safe replacement for the national cervical cancer screening systems.

  • Service design
  • User interviews
  • User research analysis
  • Workshop facilitation
  • Service blueprinting
  • Stakeholder influencing
  • Journey mapping

Taking the reigns

At NHS Digital, the breast cancer screening service needed digital transformation in order to work better for patients. I saw an opportunity to lead on service design work to understand current process for blueprinting, uncovering pain points and failure demand across multiple touch points both offline and online.

Person in mask looking at a computer screen
I quickly identified that for this work to be a success I had to build relationships and trust with senior stakeholders across PHE, NHS England, NHSX.

As part of this approach, I sought out frontline workers, who provide key support for the breast cancer service across the UK.

I spoke with

  • Radiolographers
  • Analysts
  • Clinical administrators
  • Programme managers

For a 4 month period of interviewing support staff, I was able to identify the steps and actions, technology, and policies of the end to end service. I also identified pains and opportunities and spoke at length across the programme highlight these.

Looking through the lense of the user

As part of the user centred approach, I also mapped out several journey maps, based on existing and additional research from the perspectives of key user groups. This meant I was able to highlight key pains and frustrations from different service users experiences:

  • Routine (over 50)
  • Transgender journey
  • LGBTQ journey
  • High risk journey
  • Access needs journey
Screenshot image of the referral system homepage

This blueprint of the national breast cancer screening service is now used as the de-facto map by different departments and business design teams, to identify quick wins, budgeting efficiencies, and areas of policy improvements across the care system, and for improving the cancer care experience, laying the groundwork for NHS Digital to focus and prioritise where the most damaging parts of failure are.

Outcomes

This work has introduced the previously distanced and detached stakeholders to the patient experience, and has built empathy, on the real lives and problems faced by cancer care patients.