The digital revolution: who loses out?

One of the areas that the NHS response to COVID-19 has progressed at pace is our adoption of digital platforms to communicate with our patients. GPs and hospital consultants are seeing and assessing patients via video consultation at a scale never previously seen. The national roll-out of NHS 111 will necessitate virtually all attendances to emergency departments to be via a telephone or digital triage process.

Good practice when we are changing how a service is delivered is to consider the quality impact on service users—specifically we are required to consider any impacts that may adversely affect any patient group.

Davies (2020), writing on behalf of the NHS Confederation, shares the ‘NHS Reset’ campaign plans in light of the pace of change towards digitalisation, focusing on the inclusion agenda at this time of rapid change. Davies reports that, although there is a section in the emerging NHSX tech plan vision on digital inclusion, that it does not appear to be strong on the national agenda.