04 Aug 2025 - Matt Lucht
Earlier this year, I joined the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio (DPSP) team within the transformation directorate of NHS England (NHSE).
I’m working within digital screening, and more specifically on how we can improve the participant experience of breast screening.
I’ve joined to help from a delivery perspective. When I started the team had recently gone through a number of changes of both people and scope of work. So the immediate focus was about helping to provide some stablity. Thankfully, this has settled down, and we’ve a fantastic team with a wealth of experience across public and private sectors.
Our current goal as a team is to switch from sending appointment letters through the post to a digital-first approach to communications.
We’re starting small with invitations for routine screening appointments within a single breast screening office. As we learn, iterate, and are able to prove the approach, we’ll explore the appropriateness of sending other types of communications digitally (appointment reminders, appointment cancellations, results, etc.), and ramp up the number of breast screening offices using our service.
Across England there are 76 breast screening offices; the first one that we’re going into private beta with is Birmingham.
Breast screening can be a sensitive topic for many people, often with preconceptions, especially for those who are being invited for the first time.
We recently conducted some user research with first-time attendees, and while most people understood the importance of getting screened, there were a mix of concerns that might affect their willingness to attend an appointment. These concerns included things like screening being painful or uncomfortable, body confidence, and accessibility needs.
Another consideration we face when thinking about how we communicate is that traditionally breast screening participants are referred to solely as “women”. We want to make sure that the language we use is as inclusive as possible and that everyone eligible, regardless of how they identify, is made to feel welcome and that screening is for them.
On the surface, sending invitations might seem straightforward, but like anything, when you look under the hood, it can get a bit more complicated.
To identify which invitations to send, we need to extract appointment data from the National Breast Screening Service (NBSS), an application that is older than some members of the team! We then have to consider how best to process and distribute personally identifiable data in a secure way. Finally, we need to have a robust way to track who we sent invitations to and when they were sent.
Understandably, there is a huge importance to ensure that everything that we do is clinically safe. At NHSE there is a robust process that we need to follow, and one that I’m very much still learning about! There’s probably a blog post or two about how we’re collaborating with assurance colleagues, and in particular how we’re making this work within an agile delivery environment!
…there are so many opportunities to make an impact to people’s attitudes and experiences towards screening. I’m exicted to get stuck in!