Bridging the digital divide: Making digital healthcare easier to access

For many people, managing healthcare means doing things online. Our Digital Nation 2026 highlights that 74% of UK adults use online tools to manage their health, and 82% think everyone should have the skills to use the NHS app safely. However, people with low digital confidence find tasks like creating an account, verifying your identity and navigating apps confusing, frustrating or simply out of reach. That’s why Good Things Foundation has collaborated with NHS England’s Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Team to make digital health services easier to understand and use for everyone.

What we’ve created

Working together, we’ve developed a set of resources designed to help people feel more confident using digital health services, as well as giving staff and volunteers practical ways to support them. These include:

• Easy Read guides: Step-by-step guides covering common tasks like, downloading the app, creating an account, proving your identity with or without photo ID and staying safe when using digital health services. 
• Short animated videos: Accessible videos answering some of the questions people are likely to have around privacy, data and making choices about how they use digital health services.
• Guidance for staff and Digital Champions: Practical resources for NHS staff, Digital Champions and VCSE organisations supporting people in places such as GP surgeries and community hubs.

The resources are deliberately straightforward. They’re there to help someone take the next step, and build their confidence one interaction at a time. 

Starting with people, not assumptions

One of the most useful things we’ve learned through this work is that good resources start with listening. Rather than developing guidance in isolation, we brought together people working across digital inclusion, the NHS and community organisations to understand where people were getting stuck and what kind of support would actually help.

Having a community hub employee as part of the core project team was particularly valuable. Being close to the day-to-day experiences of people using community hubs meant we could bring those experiences into conversations from the start. It also made it easier to test ideas with learners, spot what wasn’t working and make changes quickly.

That practical, community perspective helped keep the work focused on a simple question: will this make things easier for someone trying to manage their healthcare online?

Taking the resources into communities

The next step is getting these resources into the hands of the people and organisations that can use them.

From October, we’ll be sharing these resources with organisations in the National Digital Inclusion Network, with further opportunities to promote and use them during Get Online Week.

Get involved: Explore the resources, share them with your local community or network, and join us during Get Online Week to help ensure no one is left behind by digital healthcare. 

For us, this work is about more than helping people use a particular app or complete a particular task. It’s about recognising that digital skills and confidence is increasingly part of being able to access healthcare services and making sure that people aren’t left behind simply because using technology feels difficult.

Co-design has helped us keep that reality at the centre of the work: listening to communities, testing what works and making digital healthcare a little easier to navigate for everyone.

Note: This work was supported by funding from the former UK Government Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.