You might be eligible (we think, probably) - designing personalised vaccine services in the NHS

Session type:

Talk

Presented by:

Caroline Finucane

NHS England

Gabe Fender

Thoughtworks

Session time:

11 Mar 10:00 — 10:45

Session duration:

45 minutes

About the session

Theme: Designing with uncertainty | Joined-up services

“Am I eligible or not?” That’s what users want to know. But designing a clear answer is harder than it sounds — especially when you don’t have data for every vaccine, and you don’t know everything about the people using the service. In this talk, Caroline and Gabe will share how the team in NHS Vaccination Digital Services made vaccine eligibility feel personal, helpful, and clinically safe — even when they couldn’t give a straight yes or no.

Participant takeaways:

Learn how to design services that provide clear and trustworthy information even with imperfect data.
Understand key insights from testing eligibility messages with diverse user groups, specifically older adults.
Discover how we joined up services to provide users with an end-to-end journey to get a vaccination
Find out how we avoided duplicating content between the NHS website and NHS app

About the speaker(s)

Caroline Finucane

Caroline is the Design Lead for Vaccination Digital Services at NHS England. She has spent the past 19 years shaping content and leading teams to deliver essential NHS services for the public and frontline staff.

She led the content design for urgent COVID testing services during the pandemic, making them inclusive, accessible, and easy to use under pressure.

Now focused on vaccinations, she leads content, interaction, and service design across both public- and staff-facing journeys. She’s especially interested in internal service design, how we can remove the friction that gets in the way of NHS teams delivering joined-up prevention services across the system.

Outside of work, she’s usually escaping London with her two young kids in search of fresh air and space to breathe.

Pronouns: She/Her

Gabe Fender

Gabe is a Principal Experience Designer at Thoughtworks. With 19 years of experience, Gabe helps public and private sector teams design products and services that work for people, starting with user research to understand the problems that matter most. He’s led product strategy and service design across banking, mobility, transport, and health, most recently shaping the user experience of vaccine services within the NHS App.

He’s known for getting entire organisations, from CEOs to engineers, out talking to users, and for making the complex feel human, helpful, and safe. When not untangling eligibility rules or running co-design sessions, he’s probably making pizza, taking way too many photos, or exploring the countryside and beaches.

Pronouns: He/Him