Digital inclusion in health and care

Digital participation has become essential for our lives, for our health and wellbeing. But too many are still locked out. Digital access, skills and confidence has become a social determinant of health. Good Things Foundation’s Widening Digital Inclusion programme set out to understand the barriers for people with accessing and using digital health services.

This article outlines the five key areas of support that arose from the Widening Digital Inclusion programme, together with a collection of how-to guides developed in conjunction with the pathfinders. These resources can help you embed health support in your community, respond to people’s interests and reach poorly-served groups.

The Widening Digital Inclusion programme completed in March 2020, the month when the country went into lockdown following the outbreak of COVID-19. The lessons learned from this pioneering programme were brought together in the report Digital Inclusion in Health and Care. Alongside this, 5 pathfinders and 22 mini-pathfinders evolved a model of community-based digital health hubs, see Digital Health Hubs: An evaluation.

The programme identified five key areas of support: 

• Digital health: Older people
• Digital health: Long-term conditions 
• Digital health: Health inequalities and barriers
• Digital health: Health hubs
• Digital health: Health professionals

Each of the links above opens a page outlining some challenges for that area, together with a collection of how-to guides, developed in conjunction with the pathfinders.

These guides were rich sources of inspiration and practical advice in addressing digital exclusion and health inequalities. As these guides are now over 5 years old they have been moved to our research library archive but are still freely available upon request. Contact details are available on each of the five key area pages linked above.