Goodbye from Thrive by Design

After 10 years of incredibly meaningful, impactful and truly person-centered work across many parts of the health system, we’ll be saying goodbye to Thrive and moving on to new teams, organisations and sectors at the end of March 2025.

This is a sad moment for all of us at Thrive and based on the messages and conversations we’ve had over the last couple of months, it’s a sad moment for many of the people we’ve been lucky to work with.

But it’s also a time of reflection and celebration of what we have collectively been able to achieve.

A brief history of Thrive

Thrive by Design, originally mHabitat, was set up by the brilliant Victoria Betton who had a vision for creating the space for teams across the NHS to explore and develop innovative, person-centered, digitally enabled healthcare.

After 6 years leading and growing the team, Victoria stepped away and the amazing Roz Davies took the reins just as the Covid-19 pandemic started to take a grip on all our lives. Roz did an incredible job of guiding Thrive through the uncertainty leading not only the Thrive team but the digital healthcare sector as a whole, in the challenge of ensuring the rapid and relentless digital transformation our healthcare services doesn’t compound existing health inequalities and actually improves everyone’s access to and experience of the care they need.

And for the last three years the team has been led by Tim Brazier who has worked tirelessly to continue the Thrive mission and find new spaces to work in during one of the NHS’s toughest periods.

But as we see new challenges and even greater pressure on every aspect of work across healthcare, unfortunately the running of the Thrive by Design team has become unsustainable.

Although the team won’t be here, the mission of Thrive is something we will all continue to fight for in our new roles and we want to make sure all the work, creativity and humility that has been poured into our work doesn’t get lost. So, you will still be able to look through the many resources, reports, toolkits and blog posts we have shared on our website and keep the flag flying for Inclusive Digital Transformation over on our FutureNHS workspace.

Thank yous

So that just leaves some thank yous.

Thank you to all our partners, commissioners, supporters and mentors who have given their time, energy and kindness to Thrive.

Thank you to the team at Leeds and York NHS Partnership Trust, especially Dawn Hanwell and Sara Munro for being our home in the NHS, helping us to grow and supporting us through the challenges we’ve faced.

Thank you to every single person who trusted us to come into their lives, their workspaces, their communities and the places they feel most supported and opening up on their lived experiences.

Thank you to all our amazing associates who have supported us and added invaluable experience and knowledge to our team and projects.

But most of all, thank you to the team, from the very beginning to now, none of our work, none of the impact we’ve had and none of the fun we’ve had along the way would have been possible without you.

Now I know I will likely miss some people off this list but please know that if you’ve been part of the team over the last 10 years, you should be every bit as proud as the current team is to have been part of something special, and we are unbelievably grateful for the work you did that we have been able to build upon.

So, in no particular order, a final and huge thank you to:

Alison, Steph, Milton, Lauren, Sanah, Victoria, Roz, Alicia, Steve, Fran, Ali, Kirstin, Zoe M, Zoe L, Gabby, Gemma W, Gemma L, Rob, Faryal, Richard, Helen, Anne.