2026: a year to experiment?

Not going to lie, last year was pretty tough.

Though I survived… making it through a terrible sickness (pericarditis) which dragged on for many months.

Recovery was tough… I made a plan and stuck to it. I gained the benefits of improved health, compared to before I was ill. Colleagues joked, Tom are you Benjamin Button? you look younger than ever… Well approaching a big age milestone, I’ll take that complement any day.

Fresh off the back of my recovery… I stuck to my training plans and performed… I ran my first marathon in York (3 hours 24 mins). This year I also achieved a 10 mile PB of 64 mins, and half-marathon PB of 1:30. There have been minor injuries and setbacks along the way, typically after racing, but overall I am feeling much better now and aware of my body’s needs.

I’m a big advocate of bring your whole self to work.

I’m usually the first person to share if I’m having a difficult day/week/etc.

I was straight-up with my team when I needed to take time off, multiple bereavements in the family and / health emergencies. Our team are very understanding and we have collectively been supporting each other through lots of personal challenges in the last year.

Work has been pretty tough too.

All the chaos and uncertainty of organisational change, the challenging context of operating in a team reduced to the bones, I needed to resist the pressure to say ‘Yes’ all the time.

I prioritised my own well-being, but still came up with innovative ways to continue to deliver with less.

AI to the rescue?

2025 was the year that Microsoft tooling came into the foreground having spent years being overlooked.

Copilot M365, PowerAutomate/Azure AI and Copilot studio have started to super-charge our work.

Some bigger achievements include, re-platforming the UR Finder (again for the third time), enabling colleagues to refresh our AI guidance for researchers, conducted many experiments (success and failures) with AI various tools, being featured in the Government AI Playbook.

Finding ways to grow professionally, hasn’t been easy.

There has been a real lack of organisational strategy, objectives and feedback culture… what is worse, many roles, teams, structures and budgets are locked down.

Due to reorgs, it feels like everyone is stuck, ambitions for personal growth and professional development feel like they are on hold. It seems many are just hoping to survive until tomorrow. Heads down, continue to deliver, fingers-crossed.

Having completed 3.5 years in my role of Lead User Researcher the Central UCD Team, it feels like already I’ve seen much before. Training and coaching colleague, assuring, leading and managing other teams’ work. Teams coming and going, old ideas for transformation coming back around.

Sadly, many of our teams have no ‘approved’ plans for the next year. No one is seriously planning beyond the NHS England expiry-date of Spring 2027. Colleagues have described the woeful situation as ‘a holding pattern’, maybe we’ll do some proper planning when we know who is left after April?

Can we just fix it yet?

Amid the chaos and gloom, a few colleagues are talking a bit more upbeat, “a year of experimentation… do what you want now because no one will care if it goes wrong. NHS England wont be here next year either way.”

“If it succeeds, great!”

So how might we lean in more and make 2026/2027 a year of experiments, can we try to tackle some of the bigger health challenges..?

These are just a few health UX problems that my family experienced in the last twelve months.

• Why were there never ever any bookable GP appointments when we needed one?
• Why is the primary care experience health record integration so limited?
• Why are they so many secondary care patient portals?
• Why does NHS Login make me login twice (if using a patient portal after logging into the App)
• Why are GP surgeries still encouraging offline forms for GP registration?
• Why do medical records and appointment history disappear (from the App) when you transfer GP surgery?
• Why are we embedding inaccessible PDF docs inside the App?
• Why are services still reliant on posters, letters, leaflets, printed forms?
• Why have I rarely been given links / digital information about any of the conditions I had or services I have used?
• Why did one A&E department I visited have a poster with 100+ QR codes to scan back to NHS.uk?
• Why can’t I see the status of my MRI test results for nearly 16 weeks?
• Why do I have to chase up results over and over again?
• Why can’t I see my results over time?
• Why is the nominated prescribing process so clunky, why can’t I just get it near to where I am now that has stock?
• Why do parents have to transfer to same GP practice as their ex to get proxy? what if they don’t live locally?
• Why doesn’t proxy access transfer / get enabled automatically when you join a different practice?
• How come parents with Proxy-enabled still can’t access kids medical records, or book inside the NHS app?
• Why do booking notifications and outcomes only get sent to one parent, not all Parents/Proxies?
• Why are none of my health apps data (Strava, Apple health) connected to my NHS data?

Oh my, yes it has been so painful chasing the NHS this year. I’m sure there are dozens of problems you have experienced too?

I do wonder if my experience of services in Leeds are the norm, or is it different elsewhere in the country?

The NHS App has feels like a dumping group for links to third-party services. The user experience is very far from reaching the goal of empowering people to proactively, preventatively manage their health. We have a lot to learn.

This year, what I really hope for, is teams move beyond usability testing and reacting to stakeholder feedback.

Shift focus towards strategic research, understanding root causes, user experience blockers, collaborating across teams.

Don’t be afraid to build something new, start again from user needs, ignore legacy tech and constraints.

TL;DR

Had a tough year. Ended up using far more NHS services that I would have hoped for.

The 10-Year Plan will struggle to achieve the lofty goals without a radical rethink in our decision-making, design, delivery and governance processes.

Understanding the root causes of strategic blockers, putting in place better processes for collaborating across teams on strategic issues, will lead to more inclusion and equity, better user experiences and better outcomes for patients.

Be optimistic.