I grew up in the UK, but I've lived in South Korea for 6 years. The healthcare in South Korea is amazing, every experience I've had has been positive. But now me and my wife are moving back to the UK next year. Which leads me to research the current state of the NHS. I saw this today from the BBC.
As a father of a two year old daughter, this is an intimidating headline. But since moving back to South Korea after separation, I've become strangely engaged with the possibilities of UK healthcare. Because I've seen how different things can be in the UK if we try and problem solve it.
If we look at the global rankings for healthcare systems, we can see that South Korea is ranked second in the world.
And then if we look at the same list for the UK...
We're ranked 36. As a British person this isn't surprising information, we've grown up with the NHS turning up on the news over and over again as a point of concern.
But as a developer and a problem solver, I want to believe that, like all problems, British Healthcare can be deconstructed and broken down into a series of clear solvable tasks.
What stands out to me about this problem is it has a clear metric, the rank of the healthcare system. I think of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney's Wrexham Football Team as a great example of success in a somewhat similar situation. The scope of the problem is obviously incomparable, but there is great similarity in their core business question.
How can you take a low ranking football team and make it one of the best football teams in the world?
Having a core business question creates a target. For ambitious business owners like Rob and Ryan, the target creates space for ambitious exploration of the what and the how.
'What team do we choose and on what basis?' led Ryan and Rob to settle on the team that had the most potential supporters in the local Welsh areas.
'How do we buy the team?' led to the media opportunity of creating a documentary series and publicising the discussions with the local community owners that embraced Ryan and Rob's honest and forthcoming approach, whilst also creating a globally successful television show in the process.
In the development space, our core business questions help us create goals and give us a metric for defining value. The goals we set turn every refinement meeting, morning standup and Teams chat into a potential brainstorming space for any developer, project manager or business analyst to make an impact.
For my series, the business question will be:
How do we give Britain one of the top ten healthcare systems in the world? As a developer, how would you use software to do it?
As I prepare to relocate back to the UK with my wife and daughter, this business question creates a goal for my projects this year. I will code it all in public and examine it right here, sharing everything I learn. I hope you will join me on this journey.
I'm a software developer primarily with experiences in backend C# / Visual Basic and modern frontend Javascript, but also a Computer Science student using Java and Python.
This series will focus on ASP.Net / Windows based solutions for the business question above. However, with the modules I'm exposed to in Computer Science I will keep an open mind and try to expand my horizons. I believe through positivity, study, investigation and an openness to what is possible, even the most painful problems our society faces can be solved.
Next time I will showcase my first project, a healthcare system comparison API. I hope you will join me for it.
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