Today Martha Lane Fox has made four key recommendations to NHS England’s National Information Board. You can read more about them here and they are set out below:
- making sure those with the most health and social care needs, who are often the least likely to be online, are included first in any new digital tools being used across the NHS
- free wi-fi in every NHS building
- building the basic digital skills of the NHS workforce to ensure that everyone has the digital skills needed to support people’s health needs
- at least 10% of registered patients in each GP practice should be using a digital service such as online appointment booking, repeat prescriptions and access to records by 2017.
These recommendations resonate clearly with our experience working with health and care to catalyse and embed digital innovation and we very much look forward to supporting their delivery on the ground.
Leaving no one behind
It can be easily to dismiss the impact of digital exclusion, but if we don’t give careful thought to people who are less likely to benefit from digital innovation, then we run the risk of increasing inequality. Our Tinder Foundation inclusion initiative on older people’s mental health and dementia wards in Leeds has shown just how digitally excluded that group are and what an amazing different digital inclusion can make – everything from the convenience of online shopping through to using creative apps for distraction when distressed.
Building the workforce’s digital confidence
We have learnt that this stuff can be hard to do in the NHS and that the workforce’s digital confidence is highly variable. When staff are so hard-pressed, it can be all too easy to ignore the opportunities and challenges presented by digital. That is why we are also pleased be have recently secured Integrated Care Pioneer and Better Care funding to help health and care practitioners in health, social care and third sector make the most of digital in their day to day work. We hope that a digitally confident workforce will make a positive difference to the people they support in their day to day work. We also hope they will be a key to digital inclusion for vulnerable people who can so easily get left behind. We’ll be launching the programme in the Spring of 2016 and watch this space for more details.
Public wi-fi
A big barrier to supporting digital inclusion and digital literacy is the absence of free public wi-fi in many health and care buildings. We are in the process of installing wi-fi in a few of our inpatient settings and Victoria recently wrote an article in the British Medical Journal arguing the case for free public Wi-Fi which you can read her. It may seem like an obvious point but free wi-fi has to be reliable and simple to access – even the most basic barriers can decrease trust and motivation to get online.
And finally
We support Martha Lane Fox’s recommendation to accelerate digital transactions with GPs, although in our experience this isn’t a great motivator for people to go online. We need to start with the power of attraction – people’s passions and hobbies – and then show them how their interactions with primary care can be easier as well.
What do you think of Martha Lane Fox’s recommendations? We’d love to hear from you 