The ALLIANCE Digital team reviews activity in 2020

We explored how organisations adapted to remote service delivery and started conversations on using data for health and wellbeing.

In 2020, the ALLIANCE’s Digital Health and Care (DHC) team focused on creating resources and opportunities for citizens and professionals to continue to be involved in national developments around digital health and care, whilst working remotely throughout lockdown.

Third sector innovation

In Spring 2020, we released a couple of videos looking at how third sector organisations were using video conferencing to deliver services remotely. We followed this up by carrying out a small scale mixed methods research project to understand third sector experiences and needs around using video conferencing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report looks at some of the key enablers and benefits of remote service delivery in the third sector. However, it also acknowledges the vast challenges of not only delivering services remotely, but also those of rapid implementation in a pandemic context.

Other work to promote third sector innovation and knowledge sharing was carried out through the accessible medium of ALLIANCE Live productions. This enabled us to promote the principles of choice based digital service in the Scottish Government and share good practice from the NHS Education for Scotland’s Digital Service (NDS).

My World My Heath

The My World, My Health project aims to discuss the wider factors which contribute to our wellbeing, and how data linked to these factors could be used better. These wider determinants are not necessarily ‘medical’ and could include aspects of our lives such as environment, employment, lifestyle and the communities or society that we live in. Despite initial plans to deliver workshops across Scotland, the digital team have had to move the #MyWorldMyHealth engagement to the online realm.

We ran 6 workshops and an interview in November, to be followed by further engagement in early 2021. In total we engaged with 25 citizens and professionals on the topic of sharing data on wider determinants of health. The rich findings from these workshops were written into an interim update report to Nesta and have formed the basis of a wider survey, which was launched alongside an explainer video and podcast at the end of 2020.

Citizen involvement

In terms of citizen involvement, we worked throughout the year to highlight the voices of lived experience in the context of the unprecedented challenges 2020 has brought. For example, we supported the development of the Protect Scotland proximity tracing app by facilitating an opportunity for our members to feedback on the app’s privacy notice. Following on from this, we have made a commitment to support the work of the Scottish Government’s Equality and Digital inclusion for Digital Health and Care group going forward.

We have also been successful in our proposal to help establish a Digital Panel with the Digital Citizen Delivery Board. This work will evolve over 2021 and present new opportunities for our audiences to become involved in shaping digital health and care developments.

With regards to Discover Digital, the pandemic has thrown new challenges into focus and we have therefore decided to change our approach and create a more permanent resource. We are now developing content aimed at anyone who might be interested in using digital health and care tools. Its intention is to help people understand how such tools work and where find the right one for a specific need.

Keep an eye on our web pages or Twitter (this link will take you away from our website) to keep up to date and for details on any upcoming opportunities to help shape digital health and care innovation in Scotland.

Reports of other ALLIANCE programme activities during 2020 can be found in our News section.

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