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...
#AboutMeLeeds – 3 lessons in digital participation
Do social networking spaces afford opportunities for people accessing health and social care services, citizens and public sector organisations to have conversations about important topics that affect all of us? This was the question we tested out in #AboutMeLeeds which took place during the Leeds Digital Festival and which was supported by local NHS organisations and the council, NHS Employers, NHS Confederation and NHS England. We partnered with Leeds Data Thing to experiment with a social conversation which we hoped might help shape the use of data in our city. You can find out a bit more about what we hoped to achieve here. Leeds Data Thing have posted the results of #AboutMeLeeds with some intriguing insights, such as the fact that most people want access to their health records, but comparatively few have ever done so, and that many have concerns about security of their data. Whilst the results are valuable – I am equally interested in how #AboutMeLeeds worked as a social conversation and the extent to which it proved an effective means of involving citizens in Leeds. What we found is that we have a strongly connected and active health and social care community in Leeds (people accessing and working in services) on blogging platforms and on Twitter. We enjoy talking to each other. A lot! But it also showed that when it came to #AboutMeLeeds, we didn’t permeate out much beyond ourselves to other networks. The citizens of Leeds pretty much let us get on with our chat and got on with other things. Now this gives us some invaluable lessons that we can apply to future...
Can digital add rocket fuel to NHS England’s citizens’ assembly?
Recently Tim Kelsey, NHS England’s National Director for Patients and Information, blogged about his aspirations for a new citizens’ assembly – he wants it to be the next step in putting ‘patient participation at the heart of its [NHS] decision making’. Whatever! I confess my first reaction to reading the post was ‘yeah whatever’ [you can tell I have teenagers] I have heard such platitudes so many times before – words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ trip nicely off the tongue, but how often to we involve citizens really well in the NHS and how routinely do we quantify what difference their involvement has made. It can be too easy to focus on the process at expense of the outcome; involve people too late or half-heartedly; get tied up in professional structures, management hierarchies and just sheer workload with reduced resources, all of which can work against us involving people really well. But whilst I can feel jaded about the context, I can’t help but feel moved by Tim Kelsey’s intent. I know that when I’ve had the opportunity to involve people using services really well (be it from recruiting new staff to setting up new projects and services) it has been a nourishing and rewarding experience and we’ve achieved something more than we could have done on our own. Rocket fuel So what will make Tim Kelsey’s words really count for something? I wonder if part of the answer may lie in the confluence of his two areas of responsibility – technology and participation. I have previously blogged about how I believe social media affords the flattening of hierarchies,...
#AboutMeLeeds – digital as a tool for citizen participation
It strikes me as a little foolhardy to write a blog post on a topic I know precious little about and on one to which I have given very little thought. But on this occasion that’s sort of the point… A couple of weeks ago if you’d attempted to have a conversation with me about data privacy you’d have been pretty disappointed – I confess I had not give it a great deal thought; that was until we decided to do an experiment in online citizen participation during the Leeds Digital Festival, and this emerged as topic about which health and social care organisations really want to have a conversation with the citizens of Leeds. Ok… so health and social care organisations are interested; but the nagging question in the back of my mind was (and is) would the citizens of Leeds be the slightest bit interested? Doesn’t the argument tend to go ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide then why would you care who knows what about you anyway?’ But the more I’ve pondered, the more I realise that I am quite bothered. I’m bothered about the fact that Facebook use my age and gender data (willingly supplied by me of course) to allow marketers to pop wrinkle cream and diet product ads on my timeline. I’m bothered that a hospital might not properly treat my son’s impressively extreme and rare allergy properly if they can’t access his GP data. I’m bothered that I regularly get convincing illegal texts and emails trying to elicit my bank details. I’m also a little bit bothered (when I give it serious...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
