NHS Heart and Lung Resource

The motivation behind the role:

During my year placement at Enigma Interactive I was fortunate enough to take part in a project for those who were about to undergo a heart and lung transplant.

The project’s primary goal was to create an easier-to-understand and more engaging resource to explain the lifestyle changes required for the surgery to be a success. Previously, patients had been left to work through a huge book, however, this wasn’t proving particularly effective.

While this might only seem like a small problem, it’s bigger than you’d expect. The reason is, that to undergo the operation, the medical staff need to be sure you are genuinely willing and prepared to make these changes. If they’re not, they can’t do it!

Not due to a lack of trying, some patients simply couldn’t demonstrate an adequate understanding, meaning their operations had to be cancelled. This impacted both the hospital by wasting surgery time, but more importantly, was hugely detrimental to patient wellbeing.

Ultimately, it’s critical people needing heart and lung transplants get them as soon as possible. Compounding this is a limited supply of suitable organs, meaning it’s vital people can take the opportunities when they arise.

How the team I was in helped:

The Enigma team created an interactive system that guided patients through the whole process, with quizzes to help with misconceptions and the ability to privately and directly ask questions directly to staff.

Once again this might seem unusual - why would privacy be a concern if it’s only within their account? It actually makes sense, often people wouldn’t like to ask questions about potential negatives, since they thought could upset their partners who were also in the room.

By providing this “fire and forget” question functionality patients who’d previously not been able to get the information they wanted now could.

The technology:

The primary technologies used were WordPress, with custom themes, plugins and Gutenberg blocks being created.

This enabled the site to fit the NHS corporate guidelines while ensuring reusability. Once the project was finished the staff at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hospital Trust could create and manipulate pages without any interference from Enigma. They could also track how all patients were doing, and provide any additional support for those who were struggling with the content.

Key challenges:

Despite being a mostly content-based site, there were numerous learning points in the project many of which stemmed from a UX point of view. Since the site had to be suitable for everyone, accessibility was a huge priority. No matter if you were using a screenreader, or keyboard or just interacting in a typical fashion, the content still had to be available.

Furthermore, it was likely some of those using the site would have extremely limited technical literacy. This meant alongside this accessibility, intuitive design was crucial. This product was going to be the default, meaning it would be given to those who’ve barely used computers. This led to the need for being able to print the whole, or sections of the site on demand - which was a nightmare (if you’ve ever tried to style things in print and on the web you’ll know the pain)!

Finally, creating Gutenberg blocks was very challenging. This was one of my first big web projects, and they used a custom syntax built on React. As somebody who’d never done React at this point, I initially struggled. Furthering this was the lack of documentation, with Gutenberg blocks only being introduced relatively recently at the time.

This led to many hours of confusion, but having persevered I think it was a really good learning experience. It taught me crucial skills about resilience and how to navigate the internet to help resolve issues I was having, including looking at the GitHub issues. Finally, it forced me to think laterally and creatively, demonstrating that often there are multiple ways to solve problems and adaptability is crucial.

These were vital to see early in my programming career, and I think they helped me navigate university a lot better than I otherwise would have!