Leading the way for a more inclusive, digital and green city.

Leeds Digital Festival is a staple of the Thrive by Design (formerly mHabitat) annual calendar. As an organisation we value the opportunity to bring together our partners to showcase the work we’re doing within our Trust and the region, and to bring national voices and influencers into the conversation. 

Through our sessions we aim to inspire, be thought provoking and encourage positive action, and this year we have focused our sessions around being inclusive, digital and green, with a view of reimagining health and care to support everyone to thrive. 

Inclusive 

Inclusion is central to our mission. We work with teams and partners both locally and nationally, to help put inclusion at the heart of service design. We take a co-design approach to make sure that pre-existing health inequalities are not compounded as a result of digital transformation. Throughout our Leeds Digital Festival sessions we’ll bring in a variety of perspectives on inclusive co-design and examples of where it has been done well within the NHS and what needs to be done to create the conditions where it is not an add on but simply ‘’the way we do things around here’’. 

We launched Inclusive Digital Transformation as a social change programme during the early stages of the pandemic when it became clear that the impact of pre-existing health inequalities were being made worse by both Covid-19 and digital exclusion. 

By default service transformation is usually done through digital means because it can be more efficient (both time and cost), sustainable and broadly, more accessible. We have started this social change programme so digital transformation and inclusivity are not looked at in isolation. We support partners to embed Inclusive Digital Transformation into their work. This means that when services are transformed, the 14 million digitally excluded (who are often the most disadvantaged and in need of access to health and care) don’t become excluded further and are able to access the support and services they need. 

Our session on what good inclusive digital transformation in health and care looks like will explore ‘what good looks like’ and how we can embed inclusion into health and care systems. We are delighted that the fabulous Rob Webster, who won HSJ chief executive of the year and has been a long time supporter and advocate of people powered co-design, is chairing this session for us. 

The most compelling stories we can share are from when personal experience has driven digital innovation in health and care. Our people powered digital event will bring together a group of amazing individuals who have made big differences in specific areas of health and care because of their innovative response to obstacles and inequalities they, or someone they loved, faced. 

Digital

At it’s best, digital can be a fantastic enabler improving the quality and accessibility of services. It has been pitched as a solution to the overwhelming demand on mental health care services across the UK.  In a recent centre for mental health report they cited that to invest in staff productivity: e.g. flexible working and use of digital technology was a solution to that demand for mental health care is rising faster than the mental health care workforce. 

We have a special interest in mental health, we help deliver MindWell the online one-stop-shop for mental health information, resources and services which is provided for the city of Leeds, and we are hosted by Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust which is a speciality mental health and learning disability trust. 

We have also recently launched a mental health workforce digital skills guide commissioned by the NHS Confederation and we are working with NHS England and Improvement on digital inclusion and mental health. 

The issues we’ll be exploring around this at Leeds Digital Festival are two-fold, what is the landscape for digital innovation within mental health, and how can we make sure we are building a mental health care workforce that is able to confidently work with and prescribe it. We’ll be delivering two sessions on this, the digital transformation of mental health and building a digitally enabled mental health workforce. 

Green

Going green and sustainability should be at the top of the agenda for health and care and we think there is a thing or two to learn from the innovation and service transformation that happened in response to COVID-19 and apply this to going green. In the build-up to work we are going to be doing within our host Trust on their response to the climate crisis, and COP26, we are bringing together a fantastic panel of speakers for our Leeds Digital Festival event ‘’Is COVId-19 the warm-up act?’’. We’ll bring you a national, clinical, innovative and whole planetary perspective, as well as practical things you can do. We’ll be rounding off our LDF21 activity with this session in the hope it can be a springboard for positive change within those who attend.

You can see our full range of events and register for them using this link.

We have a fantastic range of speakers across our events, including: 

• Kwesi Afful

• Eleanor Tunnicliffe

• Shelley Russell

• Liz Ashall-Payne

• Rob Webster

• Anne Cooper

• Pritesh Mistry

• Kathy Scott

• Fatima Khan-ShahHenrietta Mbeah-Bankas