Meet the Dyke man who helped get Scotland out of Covid lockdown
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Dr Jay Bradley jokes that he "helped get Scotland out of lockdown" in 2020.
The 44-year-old works as a research fellow at the Moray campus of Glasgow School of Art's School of Innovation and Technology at Altyre Estate.
He is part of Scotland’s Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre which supports the innovation of health and care services.
His research primarily focuses on the design, development and evaluation of technologies and design innovation methods.
And in March 2020, before Scotland entered its first lockdown, he was tasked with perhaps some of the most important work of the pandemic - and he did most of it from his home in Dyke.
"The main method we use is called participatory design”
On March 9 2020, Dr Bradley was called to a meeting with Public Health Scotland in Glasgow.
There, a junior doctor told those at the meeting that their method of informing people of the results of their Covid tests involved a full time member of staff manually phoning people.
Identifying the method as unsustainable, Dr Bradley led a workshop to design a notification method which could be used by all 14 health boards in Scotland.
"What I do and what my colleagues do is we run design activities," Dr Bradley said.
"The main method we use is called participatory design. That basically means I, as an expert designer, use my skills to support the people who know what they're doing.
"So for the workshop we got some staff together and we took a person-centred approach.
"The idea is we create a story around the important people so in this case it's a person who's worried they have Covid.
"We went through all of that and we identified three services that Scotland needed.”
National Notification System
One of the three services identified was the need for a national notification service.
Dr Bradley and his colleagues were tasked with designing a standard service for all 14 health boards to use to notify the general public if they were positive.
"There are loads of barriers in the way to get a service into the NHS," Dr Bradley said. "So we adopted this idea of simulation. That basically saw us build the service, pay to have it built by industry partners and use dummy data because obviously we didn't have patient data at that stage.
"We then showed the NHS and at that point it's easier to make a decision to use it.”
Dr Bradley worked day and night from his home in Dyke to design what eventually became the National Notification System. And, after 51 days and 40 workshops, the system, which has been used millions of times, was ready.
"It's funny, I remember at the time my brother was learning to play the guitar during lockdown and everyone was sending messages asking each other what they were doing like "oh I'm learning Italian" and things like that," Dr Bradley said.
"Meanwhile, I was working away on this system but it took 51 days from that first meeting until the service was up and running for real people to use which is incredible.”
"You don't achieve anything in health and care without massive collaboration”
The idea for the Simple Tracing Tools system was came together on April 18.
By June 8, the system, designed for professionals, was fully operational.
But Dr Bradley, like all of the projects he worked on, says its delivery would not have been possible without "massive collaboration”.
He said: "Before the pandemic, the experts in contact tracing were actually sexual health doctors which I thought was interesting.
"We also had vets who dealt with the foot and mouth outbreak so we had advice from all kinds of people.
"Covid tools were designed mostly with professionals because it had to be done extremely quickly and right then, it was hard to get hold of citizens.
"The one thing I would say is that you don't achieve anything in health and care without massive collaboration especially when time was at a premium."
Covid-19 Community Co-management
The third service which Dr Bradley worked on was the Covid-19 Community Co-management or Co3 system.
The service allowed citizens to do their own contact tracing and was delivered in 250 days.
"It was actually completed at the same relative speed as the others but we were asked to pause in the middle," Dr Bradley said.
"It allowed people, when they got a positive notification, to contribute their own contact tracing.
"When you look at pressure and working hard you only have to look at health and care professionals."
Dr Bradley's contributions to the design of all three systems were vital in enabling Scotland to ease lockdown.
But while he admits he experienced "serious amounts of pressure" at times he adds that those experiences were fleeting.
"There was some level of responsibility but as I say there was a huge amount of collaboration so there wasn't a lot that was on my shoulders alone," Dr Bradley added.
"When you look at pressure and working hard you only have to look at health and care professionals though."
Dr Bradley is a member of the DHI design team, and his work is funded by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre.
DHI is one of Scotland’s seven innovation centres. It is a national resource, funded by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council, and has its head office within the Glasgow City Innovation District.
It is a world-leading collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and The University of Strathclyde, with a focus on innovating in digital health and care to help the people of Scotland live longer, healthier lives while providing sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
