Enabling the NHS to transform its online recruitment service
We are helping the NHS Business Services Authority (BSA) to develop a centralised and GDS compliant NHS Jobs service.
The project
The NHS is the single biggest employer in the UK. In 2018, the BSA began developing NHS Jobs to centralise the range of different job processes that were used across the healthcare system and make a new digital service for handling jobs that is GDS compliant.
Our approach
Working with our partner Difrent, we joined the NHS Jobs team in order to build an Extreme Programming (XP) Agile team that could work within a larger 30 person team. To start with, we had a small backlog of features to ship and set about deploying code to put in front of customers as soon as possible.
This included new pages that were released in just one week during the pandemic lockdown, enabling 5000 employers on a private beta to mark jobs as COVID-19 related. We also added localisation to the public-facing application with a Welsh language translation and have been working on elastic search functionality that is ready for use when needed in the future.
The results
As well as shipping features at speed, we are adding capabilities to an expansion team responsible for live support that is made up of apprentices and non-technical staff. This has involved mentoring and pair programming to improve skills and processes across the full engineering stack, testing and DevOps, so they can deploy code quickly and introduce automated testing.
- XP Agile team within larger team
- Rapid release of new features
- Localisation for Welsh language
- Elastic search functionality
“NHS BSA is an increasingly data-driven organisation, delivering services across the NHS and, together, NHS Digital and NHS BSA are the digital train tracks on which NHS technology runs.”
Matt Hancock, Health Secretary
The results
- Upskilling of expansion team
- Apprentices and non-technical staff trained
- Mentoring and pair programming
- Full stack, testing and DevOps skills
Case studies
Connecting hospital patients with loved ones during COVID
Made Tech partnered up with Hillingdon, Kettering, and London North West University NHS Hospital Trusts to develop an open source virtual visit service.
Transforming the adult social care workforce data set
We used user research and frequent release cycles to help Skills for Care transform how they collect workforce data.
