// 01The context
NHS England was responsible for the COVID-19 vaccinations programme, one of the largest public health programmes in the UK's history. NHS Digital was accountable for the Tech and Data workstream within it — part of the wider portfolio we led through the pandemic response.
That workstream had to deliver four things at once:
- The National Booking Service — population-scale booking for vaccination appointments.
- Third-party vaccination event capture services, recording each vaccination at the point of care.
- A data processing pipeline to receive those events, run quality checks, match them to demographic records and flow them to GP records.
- An end-to-end service management wrap around the digital services.
NHS Digital was commissioned to design and build the National Booking Service in September 2020. In October it was asked to take full accountability for the whole Tech and Data workstream, to make a critical December launch.
// 02What we did
In September 2020 our people were engaged to provide programme and delivery leadership for the National Booking Service. It went live in December 2020, after a rapid user-centred service design and iterative delivery process.
In November, as NHS Digital took on the wider workstream, we deployed a high-impact team at short notice:
- A programme director to lead the Tech and Data workstream — a critical role in the vaccinations programme leadership team.
- Delivery management to coordinate and lead delivery across every part of the workstream.
- Solution assurance leadership, so that all services, third-party ones included, were integrated, resilient and safe before go-live.
"We are very grateful to Axiologik for their leadership on our Covid Vaccinations Program, which has been an intensely challenging initiative. Once again, they have exhibited a rare ability to lead very large complex digital programs."
— SARAH WILKINSON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, NHS DIGITAL
// 03The results
We steered the service to go live in December 2020, then led the scaling and expansion needed for whole-population vaccination.
By the end of May 2021 the service had processed more than 50 million vaccination events, 24 million of them booked through the National Booking Service.
The ability to mobilise quickly, the know-how to build and iterate complex digital systems at pace, and strong leadership all contributed to a programme that was a fundamental enabler of the country emerging from the pandemic.
