On the morning of 10 November I had an idea in bed about walking aids. By nine that evening it was a working product at aidback.co.uk, with two demo trusts anyone can click around and five walkthrough videos. This is what we built, and how a day was enough.
The problem
The NHS lends out crutches, walking sticks and frames by the hundred thousand, and most of them never come back. A 2019 freedom of information request to 66 trusts found 241,779 aids missing against 67,491 returned. NHS England wants trusts to get 40% back. Most get somewhere between 7% and 36%.
The trusts that do run return schemes mostly count by hand. One told researchers there is "no database in which issued walking aids are logged". That makes the figures slow to produce, and it means that when a safety notice comes out for a batch of crutches, nobody can quickly say who has them.
What Aid Back does
- Handing out an aid. Where, what, and the patient's mobile, in a few seconds at the front desk.
- Reminding the patient. Six weeks later they get a plain text with a link to their own page: no login, nothing personal shown. One tap to say returned, still using it, or please collect, and every drop-off point with opening times and parking.
- Counting returns. What came back, what passed checks and what was scrapped.
- The report. Return rate, reuse, money and carbon, in the NHS England tracker layout, without the spreadsheet.
- Safety notices. Find every patient given a recalled batch, and the stock to quarantine.
There are two levels. Counts holds no patient data at all, which matters to information governance teams. Full adds hand-out logging, reminders, stock and recalls.
The day
- Morning: the idea.
- 13:45: the research in: how UK trusts run returns now, the NHS England tracker, the products on the NHS Supply Chain catalogue.
- 16:24: version one working: issue, remind, return, report, recall, plus the sales site and two demo trusts.
- 17:31 to 18:30: a page for our partners at Warp It, and a new logo.
- 20:58: the walkthrough videos recorded again with the new logo. Live.
It is 52 pages and around 8,200 lines, on the same kind of setup we build for clients. I worked with AI coding agents throughout: they wrote and tested the code while I made the decisions. That is how a product that would have taken weeks took a day.
What is not done yet
Aid Back has no customers yet. The next step is a three-month pilot with one trust, so if you run a walking aid scheme, or know the person who does, I would like to hear from you.
Have a look at the walkthroughs, or open the demo: no form, no login. If you have an idea of your own sitting in a spreadsheet, get in touch.
Want something like this for your business? We're in Scarborough - websites start at £49.
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