Leadership of Critical Change
Designing Exceptional Services
Digital Organisation Optimisation
Driving Engineering Excellence
Service Ops Modernisation
Unlocking the Cloud
The Context
NHS England is responsible for the COVID-19 Vaccinations programme, one of the largest Public Health programmes in the UK’s history, with NHS Digital accountable for the Tech & Data workstream within the programme. The Tech & Data workstream has responsibility for:
- Establishment of the National Booking Service, the population-scale booking service to allow citizens to book their COVID-19 vaccination appointments
- Delivery of 3rd party vaccination event capture services to record vaccination events at the point of care for vaccinated citizens
- Establishment and operation of a data processing pipeline to receive vaccination events from point of care systems, perform data quality checks, match events to demographic records and subsequently flow to GP records; and
- Provision of an end-to-end service management wrap for the digital services.
In September 2020, NHS Digital was commissioned by NHS England to design and build the National Booking Service. In October 2020 NHS Digital were asked to take on full accountability for the Tech & Data workstream to ensure the service would be ready to achieve a critical December launch.
What we did
In September 2020, Axiologik personnel were engaged by NHS Digital to provide programme and delivery leadership for the COVID-19 National Booking Service, which successfully went live in December 2020 following a rapid user-centred service design and iterative digital delivery process. In November 2020, as part of NHS Digital agreeing to take on responsibility for the Tech & Data workstream, Axiologik deployed a high impact team at short notice to provide:
- A programme director to lead the overall Tech & Data workstream, a critical role within the COVID-19 Vaccinations programme leadership team
- Delivery management capabilities to coordinate and lead delivery across all aspects of digital delivery within the workstream
- Solution assurance leadership to ensure all services, including 3rd party services, were fully integrated, resilient and safe ahead of 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, CEO - NHS DIGITAL
The Results
Axiologik personnel successfully steered the service to go live in December 2020 and rapidly led the scaling and expansion of the service to enable whole population vaccination. By the end of May, the service had processed over 50m vaccination events, with 24m of those booked through the National Booking Service. Axiologik’s ability to mobilise quickly, know-how in building and iterating complex digital systems at pace and strong leadership capabilities are all significant contributors to the success of this critical programme, a fundamental enabler to emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
- 50m Vaccination events May 2021
- 24m Vaccinations booked via National Booking Service
