We’re delighted to present our finalists for the category of “Digital inclusion and improving health inequalities”.
Frome Medical Practice: Bridging the digital divide: Reducing health inequalities through inclusive care
Overview: Frome Medical Practice provides over 13 hours weekly of community-based digital support, reaching thousands of patients. By providing devices, data, and hands-on guidance, we have increased NHS App use, reduced digital fear, improved access, and relieved frontline workload across primary care.
What happened? We have moved away from a traditional, building-based model of care to a neighbourhood approach that meets patients where they are. This has included Digital Cafés, weekly, free drop-in sessions offering hands-on support, attended by over 1,800 residents; Digital Health Desks within the practice and across community venues, offering over 13 hours of support per week; and targeted support for housebound patients. Through partnerships with The Good Things Foundation and Donate IT, we have provided over 450 free devices and 200 data SIMs to patients in need. We also focus on NHS App support, with practical support enabling patients to book appointments, order prescriptions, and manage care online. These initiatives are underpinned by partnerships with local authorities, charities, housing providers, and community organisations. Over 5,000 patients have received direct digital support. NHS App uptake has reached 79 percent, exceeding both regional and national averages. There has been an 80 percent increase in appointments booked online and a 69 percent increase in repeat prescriptions ordered digitally. Patients report increased confidence, reduced anxiety, and greater independence in managing their health.
Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust: From excluded to engaged: How Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust stopped communication being a barrier to care
Overview: Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust partnered with Netcall. The result is fully operational multilingual and accessible communication pathways, serving patients facing language barriers, disability, digital exclusion and low health literacy, with measurable reductions in did-not-attend rates and inequality gaps.
What happened? Working in partnership with Netcall, the trust set out to redesign the entire patient communication pathway around the needs of the people most likely to be excluded by it. Patients can now receive communications in translated letters and SMS across more than a dozen languages, and Braille output, large print, colour contrast formats and British Sign Language resources are all available. Neurodiverse-friendly communications and compassionate maternity messaging, developed with women who had lived experience of pregnancy loss, are part of the standard pathway. Patients choose their own communication preferences, and those preferences follow them through the system. Merseyside Deaf Society, Mencap Liverpool, The Royal School for the Blind Liverpool, Maternity Voices Partnership and safeguarding representatives all contributed directly to design and testing. Multilingual uptake has increased substantially since personalised translated communication became available, including 550 percent for Romanian, 650 percent for Portuguese and 286 percent for Arabic. DNA rates have fallen by 20 percent, over 30,000 letters have been accessed digitally, and financial savings are running at around £5,000 per month.
University of Sheffield in collaboration with Sheffield NIHR HealthTech Research Centre, The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: Neurotech4All
Overview: Neurotech4All addresses the significant underrepresentation of minority communities in neurotechnology research, design, and access to advanced treatments. We identify barriers to adoption and develop evidence-based guidance, tools, and case studies to support more inclusive neurotechnology research, innovation, and healthcare.
What happened? Neurotech4All brings together researchers, clinicians, healthcare innovators, charities, and community partners to investigate inequities across the neurotechnology pathway. Our work covers technologies including EEG, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and transcranial electrical stimulation. Using systematic reviews, expert interviews, analysis of existing datasets, and computational modelling, we identify performance disparities. Working with Community Research Champions and community organisations, we conduct workshops, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews. Outputs include participation toolkits, culturally appropriate recruitment resources, and practical guidance for researchers. We investigate disparities in access to neurotechnology interventions, focusing initially on Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. Using linked healthcare datasets, we examine differences in referral, assessment, treatment offer, uptake, and outcomes according to gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic deprivation. Outputs include inclusive design recommendations, technology evaluation frameworks, participation toolkits, healthcare pathway recommendations, policy briefings, and best-practice guidance.
Thermo Fisher Scientific: Thermo Fisher Scientific COPD Health Inequalities Storyboard
Overview: COPD Health Inequalities Storyboard is an intuitive analytics solution that maps multiple sources of COPD data against indicators of deprivation and ethnicity. By reducing weeks of data analysis and presentation into seconds, stretched NHS organisations and partners can work together to identify clinical variation.
What happened? The COPD Health Inequalities Storyboard is a digital analytics solution developed in partnership with Sanofi to address the challenges of COPD in the NHS. Using innovative data modelling within an intuitive interface and advanced data visualisations, the Storyboard presents national and localised COPD trends with a focus on deprivation and ethnicity data. It enables users to navigate data easily from national level to individual PCN and GP level. By automating complex data correlation processes, the Storyboard enables Sanofi and NHS teams to work collaboratively towards identifying areas of health inequalities and variation and building a strong case for change, directing resources to areas where health inequalities are most prevalent. The platform acts as an analytical tool enabling seamless navigation across four tiers of data: national ICB comparisons, sub-regional place-level variations, PCNs, and individual general practices. In Leicestershire and Rutland, initial cross-read insights provided by the Storyboard revealed low diagnosis rates standing in stark contrast with high emergency admission rates, indicating that poor case-finding was the cause of undiagnosed COPD cases being admitted to hospital.
Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust (LCH): Embedding digital inclusion into everyday care to reduce health inequalities
Overview: Leeds Community Healthcare embeds digital inclusion into routine care to reduce health inequalities. Using screening, staff training, and community support hubs, patients receive practical, face‑to‑face help while non‑digital options remain. This clinically led, data‑driven approach improves access, confidence, and safety.
What happened? LCH developed a joined‑up digital inclusion pathway, embedded into routine care rather than delivered as a standalone project. Digital inclusion training is delivered through workshops, bespoke team sessions, intranet resources, and a growing digital champion network. A Digital Ability and Literacy Screening Tool was embedded into the ‘About Me’ template in SystmOne. The tool captures ability to complete core digital tasks such as video calls, email or text, and internet use; confidence levels; and patient preference. When support is needed, staff can immediately signpost patients to 100% Digital Leeds and partner organisations, access to devices and gifted data SIMs, local libraries and community digital support, and LCH digital information hub (website) and easy‑read resources. We introduced eight Digital Health Support Hubs to provide hands‑on, face‑to‑face help. Over 500 citizens have already been supported across our first hubs, with further locations planned in community venues and public events. LCH has seen improved access to care, with fewer missed or failed contacts; increased patient confidence and independence when using digital health tools; and greater staff confidence in using digital appropriately and safely.
Canniesburn Plastic Surgery Unit/West of Scotland Innovation Hub/The Glasgow School of Art: The Clinic Education with Augmented Reality (CLEAR) app: Bridging the health literacy gap
Overview: The Clinic Education with Augmented Reality (CLEAR) app replaces written patient leaflets with immersive visual communication. In a randomised trial, CLEAR eliminated disparities in understanding for patients with dyslexia or learning difficulties.
What happened? Rather than relying on written text, our solution delivers patient information through immersive 3D visualisation using Augmented Reality (AR) providing a fully visual approach, similar to the Harry Potter “living newspapers”. The project was developed in collaboration, bringing together clinicians, patients, parents, nurse specialists, programmers, and digital modelling experts. Development followed the Virtual Reality Clinical Outcomes Research Experts (VR-CORE) digital health guidelines. Patients and parent groups were actively involved in patient journey mapping, content development, usability testing and feedback-driven refinement. The platform was built for delivery on ubiquitous consumer devices such as smartphones and tablets. The impact of the intervention was evaluated in the multicentre CLEAR (Clinic Leaflet Education with Augmented Reality) randomised crossover trial. The study included 60 participants across three surgical pathways. Results demonstrated substantial improvements with AR leaflets compared to traditional written information, including significantly reduced cognitive load (ease of understanding), improved satisfaction, improved usability, and increased learner motivation.
THINK Healthcare (Focus Group): The inclusive front door to the NHS
Overview: NHS digital tools work best for patients who already have digital confidence. Everyone else gets left on the phone. Think Healthcare’s Virtual Care Navigator (VCN) turns the phone into the digital channel. At The Hill Surgery, nearly half of all VCN users are aged over 60. Voluntary, voice-led, genuinely inclusive.
What happened? VCN integrates directly with EMIS Web and SystmOne through NHS-assured API programmes, connects to EPS for prescription handling, and mirrors the workflows of all major online triage platforms. The Hill Surgery is a training practice in East Sussex serving around 20,000 patients. GP Partner Milan Radia introduced VCN through a deliberate, staged rollout, beginning with appointment cancellations and gradually adding repeat prescriptions, condition signposting, and care pathway routing for specific patient groups. Care home patients are routed through a dedicated pathway, patients with learning disabilities can be flagged for tailored handling, and condition-specific signposting directs patients to the right resource. Repeat prescriptions are processed through EPS, and the service operates 24 hours a day. Around a third of all calls to The Hill Surgery now go through VCN, processing approximately 300 calls a week. Practices using VCN across the NHS are seeing up to 50 percent reduction in manual call handling, 30 percent reduction in DNAs, and wait times reduced from over 30 minutes to under 3 minutes at high-volume sites.
