Discovery on trainee information systems for the National School of Healthcare Science

We were appointed by the National School of Healthcare Science to conduct discovery research to help inform the procurement of a new trainee information system. 

The School collects detailed information to support trainees as they progress through their training programmes, as well as report on the overall health of entire trainee cohorts. 

The current trainee database is central to the process of managing trainees. However, we quickly found that it wasn’t meeting the needs of its users. It was also clear that it was limited in reaching the ambitions of the School who needed better functionality to support their ongoing work. 

To understand the user needs we carried out interviews with 16 users of the database and 14 stakeholders around the School and Health Education England. We also carried out an in-person user needs workshop, where we codesigned personas and user journey maps.

For this Discovery, Lagom partnered with Torchbox who carried out a technology options review to identify potential systems that could satisfy user needs across the School. 

Our research culminated in a detailed user needs backlog, a service blueprint and a set of user tested, lo-fidelity prototypes of key user journey interfaces, including dashboards. 

These outputs allowed us to craft a detailed set of recommendations about the future of the service, including potential systems that could replace the existing trainee database.