What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme?

Digital.  The word for many will summon up a faceless bureaucracy, with no one to help you navigate, no training and no-one to talk to.

Banks have transformed dramatically by being prepared to support people in using their systems, by ensuring that the digital platform delivers a better service than face to face could ever do.  By using engagement techniques banks have honed, the project will engage with patients to develop skills and learn the nuances of digital front of house, enabling the user to fully develop their skills and alter their behaviours so that more of their healthcare is managed online and stops digital being a barrier to care, and instead creates meaningful access to GPs, nurses and other workers in a practice, where all you could do in person, is much simpler to do in the online environment and delivers a better, more instinctive service.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The aim of the project is to provide a service to engage with communities, schools, individuals, including the hard to reach, to teach them how to access care via the electronic front of house tools, such as NHS App, practice websites and online services by group work, online workshops and community engagement.

Our workers will support people in the home, in community centres, schools or in practice to educate patients in making the best use of systems and give them real outcomes – so that they can develop their use to suit their needs or lifestyle – e,g, for people with learning disabilities to be able to access, and make choices for themselves, or people living in refugee facilities to engage with local services digitally, mimimising their difficulties in accessing care.  It might just be helping the elderly to have confidence that the systems available, do the job they need them to.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be delivered by specifically trained administrators, with access to relevant IT and the necessary skills to engage with people in groups, or individually, online and in person.

The practice will measure the level of engagement, looking at physical footfall, phone access, and digital first approaches (website, patient service apps, NHS app etc) and then monitor ongoing changes during the year.  The expectation is that online activity should rise, significantly as the phone and face to face activity falls.

The provision of e-learning materials, that can be used to demonstrate the work is essential.

The risk to the service is that this does not change the way that people chose to engage and so, by developing lesson plans and ensuring a quality approach, including internal validation and customer feedback, we can ensure that the offering meets the needs of the consumer and adapts as technology improves.

How is your project going to share learning?

The project will share learning by the provision of regular reports, a digital feedback forum and deliver key findings to both local practices and the wider Q community.

This will allow other units to learn from our errors, our mistakes and assumptions.  We will share the findings and ensure that they are written in an accessible format, and delivered in video, with feedback from users, both positive and negative.

We will undertake a quarterly practice wide survey – internally to understand how this has affected the work of our clinicians and administrators, and externally to understand how people who have undertaken the education have benefited or otherwise from the programme.

Additionally we will share identified barriers to success, points of failure and the learning we take from them.