Week 45: here's the chief exec
Barbados trip
Last week went like this:
- Planning with the team
- Meetings with the Chief Registrar and a new focus on certificate services
- A productive meeting with the Head of the Public Service
- A new relationship with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital
- A follow-up with the registrars and next steps agreed
- An airport meeting that opened up new opportunities
Planning with the team
We landed on Sunday evening and started with a planning session first thing Monday. I’m still working out how to help the team own planning, so they can work more independently without Public Digital’s support.
Meeting the Chief Registrar
On Tuesday, my Public Digital colleague Nic and I met the Chief Registrar at the Supreme Court. I wanted to check she was on board with the register-a-birth service we’ve been working on. She was keen to focus on services for getting copies of birth, death or marriage certificates, so I suggested we look at that next.
That evening, Claude built a prototype of one of these services from a photo of the paper form. Not great, but not bad either. I think we can use this approach to get to a prototype (maybe even a working service) much more quickly.
We also met the registrars’ team to talk through the current birth registration process, which is still closely tied to paper. They were productive sessions that surfaced a lot of blockers, and we ended with one of the senior registrars saying we need to remove the paper completely. Win!
Design critique
On Wednesday, we spent the day with the team. We had a nice lunch together, built some rapport and talked about how we’re going to ship things more quickly. Then we did our first-ever design critique of the whole birth registration journey. We ended up with a big pile of Post-it notes and realised that many problems could be solved by applying the design system to the code, rather than building each component from scratch.
Meeting the Head of the Public Service
Thursday was easily the highlight of the trip. We met the Head of the Public Service and her team. She has the authority to bring ministries together, and the meeting felt like the start of a proper partnership. We talked about collaborating on town halls, user research and a register of services across government.
During the meeting, she asked if we’d spoken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. We hadn’t made much progress setting up a meeting there. Moments later, she handed me her phone and said, “Here’s the chief exec.” We had a quick chat, he told us his diary was clear for the rest of the day, and we went straight to see him.
Queen Elizabeth Hospital
By the end of that meeting, we’d agreed to explore support from the hospital’s nursing staff for birth registrations, and to prototype a hospital triage service similar to NHS 111 in the next sprint. While we were there, the chief exec called the Head of Nursing and booked us a follow-up meeting straight afterwards.
An NHS 111-style service, which is already on our backlog, could genuinely save lives in Barbados.
Back to the Chief Registrar
On Friday, we went back to see the Chief Registrar. Nic and I had spent Thursday evening working out how we could offer meaningful help. Moving the process online is a good first step, but the back-end systems are the real challenge. We proposed a digital-first approach, leaving the back-office processes as they are for now, and focusing first on requesting copies of birth, death and marriage certificates. That landed far more warmly. My colleague even caught her trying to hide a smile.
We also set up a meeting for another Public Digital colleague to follow up on OpenCRVS next week, after conversations in Cape Town the week before. That will help transform the back end of the service.
Summary
A packed, productive week that built momentum in all the right places: reconnecting with senior leaders, surfacing real opportunities and strengthening the local team. Next steps: move forward with the certificate services, follow up at the hospital, and turn this support into tangible progress.
Outside of work, I spent the rest of the weekend travelling to Kalymnos, in Greece, for a week of climbing. It’s raining today, which is why I’m writing weeknotes on holiday.