The latest Digital Health Unplugged is now live – this time we take a look at digital inclusion and tackling the digital divide.
Host Andrea Downey spoke to Helen Milner, CEO Good Things Foundation; Surriya Walters, digital social inclusion outreach manager Good Things Foundation; and Peter Nuckley, deputy director mHabitat about their work with NHS Digital on improving digital participation.
Their work on the ‘Widening Digital Participation’ programme aimed to identify why technology and digital health solutions have a low uptake, or are unavailable to some communities, and how to address that gap.
Milner tells us there are nine million people in the UK who do not have access to the internet, leaving them digitally excluded. The main reason for this is the cost of digital devices and connectivity.
In perhaps the best analogy ever said on Digital Health Unplugged, Nuckley explained the issue of cost as: “NHS.uk is about as free as it is free to walk on the moon. So I can walk on the moon for free but I need to buy a rocket and learn how to drive a rocket, and that’s the same if you’re digitally excluded.”
Following completion of the Widening Digital Participation programme, Nicola Gill, director of the programme, wrote a feature for Digital Health exploring the findings and how to tackle the digital divide.
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23 March 2021 @ 17:42
There are many people excluded from NHS services by “Digital”, not because they cannot access “Digital” but because they reject digital healthcare and equally reject the invasion of personal privacy on an industrial scale that “Digital” enables. They opt out of healthcare rather than accept it on these terms. The price is too high, but we are not talking about money, but rights and choices that the NHS is taking away by means of “Digital”. Healthcare is being designed to serve the interests of the digital economy, rather than those of the patient. This is an industrial strategy, not a healthcare strategy. Not everyone wants to walk on the moon, in case nobody has noticed that. The problem is not so much a “Digital Divide” as a planetary divide. Think for a moment of humans – remember them? An endangered species no doubt.