What has frugal innovation got to offer the NHS, social care and wider public sector? This is a question we will be debating at our People Drive Digital #PDDigital16 festival on the evening of 28 November at the Open Data Institute in Leeds. One of our debaters is Jaideep Prabhu who is professor of Indian Business and Enterprise at the Cambridge Judge Business School within the University of Cambridge. Jaideep has written extensively on the topic of frugal innovation both in emerging markets and in the Western world. You can watch him share his thoughts about what the West can learn from frugal innovation here: So what is frugal innovation and how is it relevant to people driving digital innovation in health and care? Nesta define frugal innovation as follows: Frugal innovation responds to limitations in resources, whether financial, material or institutional, and using a range of methods, turns these constraints into an advantage. You can read a Nesta report on frugal innovation here. The report highlights many examples of frugal innovation and I particularly liked the story of the Kerala neighbourhood network in palliative care. In contrast to a doctor led hierarchical model of care, volunteers from the local community are trained to identify problems of people who chronically ill in their area and to intervene. 70 percent of the Kerala population have access to palliative care in contrast to only 1 percent at a national level. The neighbourhood network consists of more than 4,000 volunteers, with 36 doctors and 60 nurses providing expert support and advice to enable care for 5000 patients at any one time. Frugal...
What are mental health practitioner attitudes towards digital?
The use of digital technologies such as Internet sites and mobile applications, have received much hype in recent years, both in mental health and the NHS more widely. Opinions on these technologies vary; and those at either ends of the viewpoint spectrum see them as either a panacea to overstretched services or as undermining the primacy of the face-to-face patient/clinician relationship. A recent open access study has endeavored to dig beneath the hype by seeking to understand the opportunities and challenges posed by the use of digital technologies from the perspective of mental health providers. As someone who runs an NHS digital innovation programme I see how practitioners are often overlooked in the development process. This is a big problem because those same practitioners are often critical in influencing the take-up and use of digital technologies by patients. So understanding digital technologies from a practitioner perspective is a welcome addition to research in this field. I’ve written a review of this study which you can read in full on The Mental Elf site here. The Mental Elf aims to help practitioners find what they need to keep up-to-date with all of the important and reliable mental health research and guidance. They have a team of mental health experts who post blogs every week day with short and snappy summaries that highlight evidence-based publications relevant to mental health practice in the UK and further afield. You can find out more about The Mental Elf...about.me
Victoria Betton
victoria betton
director mHabitat | NHS | social media & mental health doctorate | interested in digital inclusion | parma violets fiend | http://codesigndigitalhealth.co.uk
