Discovery on a National Work Experience Service for Health Education England
Health Education England is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care. It provides national leadership and coordination for the education and training within the health and public health workforce across England.
Project overview
We were appointed by Health Education England (HEE) to conduct discovery research to inform the development of a national digital pre-employment service. They wanted to better understand the different users and their needs. One phase of the work was focused on in-person opportunities for people and an additional piece of work for the discovery delved into online opportunities.
Project goals
The main goals for the project were for the client to understand:
- how young learners/attendees access pre-employment opportunities, and how pre-employment providers/coordinators promote and process them
- the scale and nature of pre-employment opportunities that a digital service would need to support
- how to solve the whole problem for users, and to ensure the NHS gets most value from providing pre-employment opportunities
- options for a service that will be ‘fair, equitable, transparent and consistent’ and ‘reduce workload and improve data collection and monitoring’
- development options for a pre-employment management platform that meets priority user needs
Project team
A multi-disciplinary team delivered the Discovery work and consisted of a service designer, two user researchers, a delivery manager and a technical architect.
What we did
- Conducted 11 stakeholder interviews and 28 one-to-one user interviews
- Analysed a user experience survey with 50 responses.
- Analysed 3 user needs surveys with 149 responses in total
- Ran a user needs workshop and 1-2-1 user needs sessions
- Developed 6 user proto-personas
- Created and prioritised 89 user needs
- Developed concept prototypes and tested these with 9 users
In the additional work that followed the Discovery we also reviewed 34 online learning sources and conducted 15 one-to-one user feedback sessions.
Project outcomes
The Discovery delivered a backlog of 89 user needs, and 29 recommendations and low fidelity prototypes, plus a service blueprint to progress and meet those needs.
Working with Lagom Strategy has been an incredible experience, it felt like a genuine collaboration, nothing was too much trouble. The team was extremely good at checking our needs/problem space and enabled us to better understand the challenges and assumptions. They are familiar with the NHS and how things work which greatly assisted the planning process. The whole experience was seamless, well planned and executed, we were consulted on all aspects of the work and outcomes. As the commissioning team we’ve learnt a lot, which we can now bring into our current and future work. I would definitely work with Lagom Strategy again.
Rachel Wright, National Programme Manager, Widening Access and Participation team
