Hack NHS
A Couple of weeks ago I took participation at NHS navigation hack
Healthcare is a complex isue all over the globe. But it can be even more challenging when you deal with healthcare system that is out of your culture background and life experience. So its really a big problems for migrants to deal with NHS in the UK. The problem is so significant that, event such conservative organisation as NHS has started doing some steps in order to solve it.
Hackaton took place at the Google Campus and was organised by Raj, who is very enthusiastic in how tech can help NHS, and he saw hackaton as an opportunity “to bring things to the next level”.
There were several main topics that teams were trying to solve:
The GP team created an app called ``GP for me`` which helps migrants to navigate their way around the GP registration process
The Hospital Visits team created an app called ``My NHS`` which provides information about preparing for a hospital visit, making an appointment and what to expect when you get there.
The Midwifery team created an app called ``MatNav``, which is is a multi-language guide to prenatal care in the UK
The pharmacy team created an app called ``Pharmacee`` which helps people to decide whether they can go to a pharmacist for their ailment. It also tells people their nearest pharmacy and how to communicate effectively with the pharmacist.
The Mental Health team created an app called ``Mind Checker``, which asks the user a series of questions to determine if they may need mental health support, and then directs them to people who can help.
Healthy Living
The Healthy Living team created an app called ``Dots Community``, which enables people to ask questions and get advice from people of the same cultural background.
The Accident and Emergency team created an app called ``NHS Health Pass`` which aims to make visits to A&E a lot easier.
For me as a migrant in the UK and facing a lot of challenges dealing with NHS (I have 2 kids and my youngest one was born here in UK) it was interesting to hear that people from all over the world are having the same problems with NHS as me, and have similar ways to solve it.
First thing migrants need to do in order to get access to healthcare in the UK — register at GP (general practicion). Main problem is that most of the newcomers to the country don’t even know what it is, and how to deal with it. So they start googling “What is GP”. Next thing is where to find the nearest one. Next step — proof of address and passport, which is showstopper for illegal migrants or asylum seekers (they don’t have passports or proof of address). There are ways to register without such documents, but staff at Surgeries are usually not aware of that, or simply dont want to deal with such troubled patients that are going outside of usual registration flow.
The next problem appears if you need to see a specialist. After you have registered you need to book an appointment to GP. At the appointment — GP would decide if your condition is severe enough so you need to see a Doctor. Main trouble here is that NHS is semi free system, and it has its own budget, which is planned, so specialist visit would cost a lot more than GP visit. So GP is kinda gateway between patient and getting an expensive(for government ) treatment.
So if you’re lucky enough — you will get your specialist appointment , but waiting time could be several month sometimes, which is pretty ridiculous.
I had such experience with my newborn child, when I need to wait for 2 months just to get telephone appointment with proper specialist, so she would talk to us by phone and decide what do next. I ended up just popping into Ambulance and Emergency unit, and getting proper treatment there at the same day.
One of the participants in hackaton from the healthcare professionals who works at AE, told us that many migrants are not registering with GPs at all, and just use AE as a regular primary care unit. The reason is that they can go there and in 3–7 hours “they will see proper doctor with stethoscope and wearing scrubs, who will assign lab tests and write proper subscriptions”
Other challenges migrants face is lack of medication they’re familiar with. So many people are just buying tons of drugs when they are travelling back to home country on occasions and bring the stuff back to the UK.
Same thing with specialists , sometimes its just easier to go back to your country to get proper fast treatment of dentists, gynaecologists and so on.
Other big barrier is cultural difference. For example “healthcare visit” team told that in some countries it would be inappropriate when someone outside of the family visiting newborn baby at home. So there are many problematic situation happening on that topic.
So it’s not only migrants facing problems dealing with NHS, but HNS staff itself having hard time dealing with people arriving from all over the globe.
Hackaton
Teams were organised including designers, developers, business strategists and healthcare professionals. And what was the greatest side of this— people from all the fields were sharing their professional experience with the others. It was wonderful to see that tech people learned a lot about healthcare and people from NHS learned such frightening words as “html, css, java or objective c” 😃
I was in the team that was trying to deal with broad issue — healthcare living. For example, for you being migrant it is hard to find proper food shops if you are on kosher, or need special exercises with equipment that you don’t know where to find locally. You don’t know how to deal with NHS, you don’t how to use public transport , and so on. So many things are new for you when you arrive to the UK.
Our idea for the app was that it would be great if I am as a migrant, could get proper knowledge and advices from people with the same cultural and life experience, who have arrived to the UK earlier and went through all those different problems and got proper solutions that they can share.
So we ended up with app that connect mentors with advice seekers. Kinda stackoverflow but for broader range of topics and ability to chat with mentors privately.
Idea was that you ask questions and, people from the same culture or speaking the same language are — answering you on the question board., Other people with different language background can provide answers on the topic using their own language — and that way knowledge base is built.
At same time, you can talk to mentors privately. Mentors are categorised with topics of their expertise. When you ask them a question and get an answer, you can mark answer as useful and request mentor to publish it to the global knowledge base.
Simple example .It was very hard for me as a migrant to open a bank account in the UK. If someone can walk me through proper steps on how to do it, it will reduce a number of pain points in that process and the timing of whole process will be reduced significantly as well.
With some small investment in marketing at the very beginning (some pamphlets can be distributed in refugee camps for example, so people aware of it before arriving to the UK), there is no need on ongoing marketing for the platform, cause people arriving to the UK will be referring to others this site as a knowledge base. Also when you got through settling process yourself as a migrant with help of mentors from your country or culture, you will be eager to become mentor yourself.
So I want to thank my team that Ii spent amazing 2 days with , building cool things: Zach, Korinna, Alex, Max, Samuel, Musa, Yahaya.
At the very end — GP team won the main prize on hackaton because it was the most problematic topic for NHS, so they desperately were searching for some solution in the field.
Bonus video of event
If u are interested in how tech can help migrants and refugees all over the world u can visit http://techfugees.com or join slack group https://blooming-garden-6183.herokuapp.com
