This week has been great for getting into the detail of community health. We met as a team and worked out how we want to work, ceremonies, tools etc, but more importantly who was going to focus on which part of community health and with which providers.
This has helped me zoom in on a couple of areas and reduce the overwhelm. The wider part of the experience, other pathways and providers, can come in later — but it’s good to get stuck into one or two bits in detail first, I find.
In fact, this is something I didn’t master in screening. I tried to get across all of it at once, which is near impossible in that space, and it meant I was ineffective for too long. I would have been better served getting stuck into one screening service or area before broadening.
But I digress. Musculoskeletal (MSK) and scheduling/ rostering it is. Scheduling is good as I think that the issues won’t be dissimilar to how it works in breast screening — something I’m familiar with.
MSK is more problematic, not least because I hate acronyms and vowed off using them wherever possible about ten years ago. But saying ‘musculoskeletal’ is not easy and it’s not fun. Small problems.
The other thing rattling around my head this week is blueprinting.
I think this is somewhat of a hangover from SDinGov, where I saw a talk basically saying that service design IS mapping. I wholeheartedly disagree with that — I think it’s reductive — but then we had a list of goals for community health and on there was ‘blueprints of the service.’
Given that what we’re doing is assessing pain points and opportunities so that we can put together benefits cases, it’s not clear why delivery of blueprints would be a goal. The team agreed, not least because ‘blueprints’ was a euphemism for ‘understanding the service’ — which does make sense as a goal.
In this context blueprints seem best for sense-making. And the value in doing them is perhaps greater than in the value of having one done.
I think it’s the idea of a blueprint being an end point that makes me uncomfortable. They are a means to an end, not the end itself.
So my role is to support and do some research with providers, to map what we find (but not exclusively do this — others can/ will do the same I expect), and then turn that into something presentable based around benefits. We’ll have to extrapolate the key parts from the maps.
So even in this small bit of work, you can see that mapping is merely one part of the job. If I just started and finished with mapping, I’d be doing a disservice to the team, adding less value than I ought to be, and possibly a little bored.
It ain’t all about the mapping.