Transforming care into a digital service: Scotland’s journey

AUDIO: Prevention and co-design are key features of Scotland’s national digital healthcare and wellbeing service for seniors, but it is far more than just a website, Australian providers recently heard.

The Living it Up program was set up to transform health and care into a digital service for people aged over 50s and was developed in collaboration with more 3,500 citizens, the program’s former manager Janette Hughes told the Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) conference.

Scotland was focused on innovation and technology-enabled care for seniors that put people and their wellbeing at the centre, she said.

“It is about health but it is also about prevention – prevention is key to sustaining the demographic shift as we move forward in the next 20 years,” Ms Hughes told Technology Review.

The online self-management hub was designed in response to the community consultation and aimed to combat social isolation, build community capacity, personalise information resources, facilitate technology-enabled care and enable people to self-manage their health and wellbeing through four core services.

Technology Review’s Natasha Egan spoke to Ms Hughes after her presentation about Living it Up and how Scotland was embracing technology for seniors:

Benefits and lessons learned

The Living It Up hub is more than just a website and aimed to give people confidence to enter back into the community, said Ms Hughes. It was having a big impact on behaviour change and building community resilience, she said.

Discussing the lessons learned, Ms Hughes said that putting health and wellbeing into one place was a hard balancing act but the benefits would be reaped over time. There needed to be both a top down and bottom up approach to create an innovative digital health ecosystem, she said.

“Consider agile and incremental developments and you need to co-design. Unless you have social acceptability this will not take off,” she said.

Here Ms Hughes shared some of the benefits Scottish citizens were seeing and offered advice for adopting a similar model in Australia:

Photo: eventphotography.com

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