For Day Two of HTN Summit 2020, we welcomed Henrietta Mbeah-Bankas, Head of Blended Learning and Digital Literacy Workstream Lead at Health Education England. Henrietta presented a session on ‘digital literacy’ and the importance of digital capabilities in the delivery of health and social care.
Henrietta said: “Health Education England is embarking on a massive piece of work around enabling a digitally ready workforce. Digital literacies are those capabilities that fit someone for living, working, learning, participating and thriving in a digital society.”
“The digital capabilities framework looks at digital capabilities from 6 domains: information, data and content; teaching learning and self-development; communication, collaboration and participation; digital identity, wellbeing, safety and security; technical proficiency; and creation, innovation and research.”
“The type of change we are seeing in digital is different to what we have seen recently; patients are now encouraged to manage their own health through digital apps. Since Covid hit, technologies are flying in but our ability to adopt and use it is at a slower pace. We need to govern smarter and learn faster, but is that going to address that rate of change? We need to think about other interventions to support us in that change.”
“Digital readiness is around adaptability over anything else; being adaptable doesn’t happen smoothly and has its challenges.”
Henrietta then described the challenges around ‘people’ becoming more digitally literate.
“Digitally negative, digitally ambivalent, digitally engaged, and digitally excluded, are the types of challenges that we face when developing the workforce on digital literacies.”
“The challenges around technology centre around design of the tech we are using and is it user centric?”
“The ethical questions are at the forefront of any professional; the increased usage of AI for example and the worries of the ethics around it. We need to ensure risks around the technology we are using is understood and assurance is received in terms of GDPR.”
Watch the session here:
