digital exclusion

Digital exclusion will damage your health

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What were you doing in July 2013? I’ll tell you what I was doing; I was anticipating the start of something great for Tinder Foundation as we embarked on a partnership with NHS England.

Long before we launched the now award winning Widening Digital Participation programme in the summer of 2013, we’d been talking internally about the correlation between health issues and digital exclusion. You can’t ignore facts, and the facts were showing a huge synergy between the two.

Two years into the three-year project, and the facts once again speak for themselves. I’m so glad we’re on this journey with NHS England at a time when the shift towards digital by default services has become even more widespread throughout health services in the UK, and the danger for people suffering health inequalities to be left behind becomes even greater.

Since the project began we have:

  • Made 235,465 people aware of online health resources
  • Trained 158,171 people to improve their digital health literacy – that means showing them how to access and use health resources, such as NHS Choices, to manage their health
  • We’ve also trained over 4,000 volunteers to support other people to improve their health by using digital
  • Provided grants to support over 200 community partners (each year of the project) to deliver digital health literacy training and support to people wanting to learn more.

The numbers are growing all the time, our partnerships – both local and national – are working. Great things are happening through digital.

But, there’s so much more we can do. We’re well underway with year three of the programme and we’re looking ahead to what happens when we finish in March 2016. But, I don’t think of it as the end because the last three years we have laid the (strong!) foundations – it’s just the start.

Read our new report, it identifies four key things we intend to do to extend the life of our work:

  • Create capacity for our hyperlocal community partners so that they can continue doing what they do best
  • Continue shouting about the work our partners are doing, and the benefits digital health literacy have
  • Work with more GPs, make sure they understand the value of digital health literacy
  • Focus on joined-up policy responses that promote local support for digital health training

If we can do this, then we can help so many more people, like the wonderful Amy, who’s story you can hear in this video:

Obamacare: Cash poor, health poor, digital poor. Can we help? Yes we can

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A few bugs in the Obamacare website is not the real story here. It’s the fact that, according to Pew Internet, 48 million Americans don’t use the internet at all and millions more can’t do online transactions. Tinder Foundation is a UK non-profit with a proven solution to help millions to get online and use Government services. A year ago I would have said that our success wasn’t relevant to this story unfolding over the pond but now I know that it is – the stats tells the story. In the US and the UK the people who are offline are basically the same demographic and have the same barriers: 50/50 of offliners are over/under 65 years of age; around 40% live in households on very low incomes; and about 50% have a low educational attainment (no high school diploma in the US and don’t have 5 GCSEs in the UK). Lack of perceived relevance and not having the skills to use the internet are the two main barriers. If the problems are the same then the solution could be too.

The correlation between those who are the ‘digital poor’ – who don’t and can’t use the web – and poor health is huge. Just looking at life expectancy is a clear indicator: in London the average age at death ranges from 71 in Tottenham Green to 88 in Queen’s Gate and in Washington DC life expectancy for the poor is 71 years and for the education professional it’s 83 years.

The cost of healthcare is not something we have to worry about in the UK, we’re lucky to have the NHS so much so we often take it for granted. If you fall ill in the US it’s down to you to foot the bill – unless you have health care insurance. It is estimated that between 32-50 million Americans don’t have any cover and with the average visit to the emergency room costing £780/$1,265 it can be expensive. Unsurprisingly the number one reason for bankruptcy in the US is health care costs. So Obamacare is there to help people who are cash poor, and who will in all likelihood suffer health inequality, and will also suffer digital exclusion.

Tinder Foundation is lucky to be working with NHS England to tackle the ‘digital poor’ so that they can benefit in the drive for better health information, health prevention, and more conversations about health – all to be online. Our work with our 5000 hyperlocal partners in the UK online centres network will increase the web literacy for those digital poor so that both have the skills to use it and know that it can improve their and their families’ health. Tie that together with essential tools such as the free Learn My Way online courses helps people to learn as well as local partners to track that learning using the data analytics. I think this is a model that could help Americans to not just register for Obamacare but also to access online information to keep them healthy too.

We’ve helped over 1 million people at a unit cost of £30/$50, and I know our model could work for much higher numbers of people where there is a collective will to make it happen. This kind of effort, at the kind of scale that’s needed, takes time, fantastic partnership building on the ground, and persuasive and focused leadership.

It’s easy to see that the introduction of Obamacare should benefit millions of people. Stop talking about the bugs. Bugs in a website are a temporary problem and I’m sure there are hundreds of programmers busily fixing it right now. It’s the 48 million Americans who don’t use the web that is a more difficult problem to fix.