Designing the Next Generation of NHS England’s Collaboration PlatformFutureNHS — Enabling Knowledge Sharing Across the Health & Care System

Role: Product Director
Team: Cross-functional team (Inception with Product Director, Delivery Director, Technical Director, then full cross-functional product team)

The Challenge

FutureNHS is the national collaboration platform for the UK health and care community. It hosts more than 1,000 communities and supports over 50,000 monthly active users. During COVID-19, usage surged as NHS staff across the country relied on the platform to share knowledge quickly and work together under pressure.

To meet this growing demand, NHS England needed a platform that was more engaging, easier to use, scalable, and more cost-effective to run.

My Contribution

As Product Director, I worked closely with NHS England’s product and service teams to define how the next version of FutureNHS should work and what value it needed to unlock for its users. I brought structure, strategic clarity, and a collaborative way of working that aligned stakeholders around a shared future vision. By bridging product, delivery, and technical considerations, I helped shape a successor platform designed for long-term impact across the entire NHS ecosystem.

From Insight to Platform, that inspires a new collaboration model

We began with a clear mission:

Increase collaboration across the NHS while reducing long-term operational costs.

Through co-working sessions, discovery activities, and iterative design, the team mapped key usability issues, identified scalability constraints, and shaped a future-ready platform architecture. By partnering closely with the client team, we were able to challenge existing assumptions, simplify the experience, and design an open-source platform that could evolve with NHS needs.

Impact

The work laid the foundation for a more modern, scalable FutureNHS — one that can support deep collaboration across the health and care community, while improving ease of use and reducing ongoing maintenance costs.

Polly Jones, Head of Innovation and Collaboration at NHS England, said:

“NHS England aims to become a truly digital organisation. We were looking to engage partners aligned with our vision, who challenge our thinking and improve our ways of working. Red Badger has demonstrated a great cultural fit and alignment with our team.”