Should all NHS premises provide free access to wi-fi
Below is my argument for free access to wi-fi in NHS settings that I made in a recent ‘head to head’ article in the British Medical Journal. You can find the full article, including the ‘no’ argument made by GP Grant Ingrams here. Aspirations for digital technology to transform health and care systems are high. The UK government’s reportPersonalised Health and Care 2020 sets out a framework for digital technology to improve patients’ experience and outcomes with more efficient services.1 Citizens will have full access to their care records, an expanding set of NHS accredited health and care apps, and digital information services. We will transact with health services by accessing diagnostic results, ordering prescriptions, and contributing patient generated information to our care record. This bold ambition can be realised only with digitally engaged citizens and the removal of barriers such as lack of access to public wi-fi in healthcare settings. The health divide will widen unless action is taken to ensure that people who are digitally less confident have access to their health information and can make sense of it.2 Digital ubiquity Digital technologies are increasingly widespread in day to day life, but healthcare seems to lag behind other sectors and the expectations of citizens.1 The telecommunications regulator Ofcom says that 93% of UK adults have a mobile phone and 61% have a smartphone.3 The 2013 Oxford Survey of Internet Cultures, which included around 2600 UK adults, indicated a trend for people to use their mobile handset to access the internet and a growth in “next generation users,” who use multiple devices on the move.4 We have seen substantial increases...
#PdDigital15 – next steps in serendipity
Towards the end of 2014 a question start niggling, and then an idea started brewing, and then that idea emerged into a fully formed thing (well an event to be precise) in May. You can find out more about #PdDigital15 and where it all started here. There wasn’t a grand plan for #PdDigital15 and its meandering journey has been informed as much by serendipity as by design. At the core of this path has been the central question: How can we unleash people driven digital health and wellbeing? It was this question that framed #PdDigital15 the event and it is also at the heart of the white paper that Michael Seres and I launched at a breakfast session at the King’s Fund Digital Health and Care Congress today. You can find my Prezi presentation here. The central point Michael and I endeavoured to convey is the message that burst out of #PdDigital15 conversations loud and clear – there is a groundswell of people who want to influence, collaborate, inform and codesign digital in health and care; there is need to balance regulation with support for creativity and ground up innovation; the system needs to recognise, support and enable this to happen but not dominate or own it; tensions between the disruptive potential of people led digital and the more conservative tendencies of services need to acknowledged and power shared. You can find the white paper and summary version here. We are taking our learning on tour during the rest of this year and if you’d like it to drop in to your event then do get in...
Digital is just a fad.
‘Digital is just a fad’ ‘Digital is just a distraction from the real problems facing healthcare’ ‘Digital is just another thing to learn and I don’t have time’ These are all challenges I’ve recently heard from healthcare professionals recently who are reticent and doubtful about the value of spending time developing their understanding of social media and digital tools/services. Everyone is busy and everyone is overstretched. So why should their attention be focused here when they are so many other more pressing priorities? Their wariness is in sharp contrast to a talk on widening digital participation by Bob Gann at a recent mHealthHabitat breakfast discussion in which he shared the following three stark facts: Low health literacy is closely linked to poor outcomes and mortality Information and services are increasingly digital – digital skills are increasingly linked to health literacy Those who are least likely to be online are those who most need health and care services. If digital skills are important for people needing health and care services then they are also important for practitioners who are delivering those services. Increasingly, practitioners need to incorporate digital mediation in to their day to day work – helping people find and make sense of the best health information and digital tools online. Digital skills aren’t just technical skills – they are skills in appraising information online, they are skills in participating in online communities to maximise their beneficial effects and minimise harm; they are skills in understanding whether a mobile app is based on evidenced clinical effectiveness and deciding if you’re ok with how it uses your data; they are...
What could Minecraft & the NHS possibly have in common?
A quick Internet search for *Minecraft* and *health* results in a plethora of sites which tell you how to restore the health of your player – health being the meter of endurance in Minecraft and represented by the number of hearts you have on your screen. What pops up next are the desperate pleas of parents wanting to know how to keep their children’s obsession with Minecraft *healthy*. What doesn’t readily appear is anything about Minecraft’s application in a health context. I’ve been fascinated by Minecraft since, like millions of others, my youngest child became obsessed by this open ended creative and imaginative game. His focused hours of application, concentrated self-directed learning and mind-blowing creations must be the stuff of dreams for many a primary school teacher wanting to motivate their pupils. And not surprisingly there is a growing industry developing around Minecraft as an educational tool. I went along to the Playful Leeds Minecraft Unplugged workshop, along with my resident 10 year old Minecraft enthusiast, in order to think about how the game might have an application in an NHS context. The session was led by Adam Clarke, who amongst other things, has created Tate Worlds and Alan Lewis who has won awards for the virtual worlds he has built in Minecraft. Although I couldn’t find any reliable figures on the web, I was surprised to learn from Adam that there are fairly equal numbers of males and females playing Minecraft. I also found out that there is a Minecraft server for children with autism and their families called AutCraft but I’m not aware of anything else out...
Digital and making the invisible visible
This week I was invited to speak at a Ministerial event in Leeds which showcased the growing community of data, digital and health in our city. The opportunity to share the mHealthHabitat programme with an audience was great, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to reflect on who gets to be in the conversation and who doesn’t. My post is offered in a spirit of enquiry and in making visible what can easily be rendered invisible. It was visible to me that I was the only woman on the invite list (as it turned out there were two other women present in the audience). All the speakers, apart from me, were men. Once I had noticed gender it was only a small leap to notice that everyone was white, almost everyone was wearing a suit, and everyone was of a certain age. There was no one there bringing patient perspectives to the conversation. There are two things I am not doing in this post – firstly, I am not taking the moral high ground, if it had been an event full of white women I may well have not noticed if there were no black women there. I noticed because I was in a minority myself. Secondly, I am not criticising this particular event – it’s an example of what seems to be business as usual most places you go when it comes to digital. The event was successful in rendering visible to myself, and no doubt other participants, that there really is a growing community of people in the digital and...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
