The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) and Voluntary Health Scotland are seeking up to 6 third sector organisations to pilot use of the national Right Decision Service platform to deliver web and mobile apps. This is a key opportunity to deliver information in an easily accessible and engaging format to support your service users in making informed decisions about health, care and wellbeing. No programming skills are required. Expressions of interest should be submitted by 5pm on Wednesday 1st June 2022.
Background
The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre manages the national decision support programme on behalf of Scottish Government Digital Health and Care. The programme is based on a national Once for Scotland platform – the Right Decision Service. This enables health and social care organisations across all sectors to build decision support solutions, including informational web and mobile apps.
Some examples of public facing Right Decision Service apps: (Links are to the web versions; download the mobile apps from footer of the web pages.)
- Long COVID
- Managing Medicines (choose the patient and carer toolkit)
- Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow
How will it work?
The DHI team will provide up to 2 staff from each pilot organisation with training over 2-3 sessions, each lasting 1-1.5 hours. The training will cover:
- Co-designing your app with users
- Formatting and organising content, including text and media.
- Basic interactive functionality – e.g. visual pathways, simple decision trees.
- Governance and quality assurance
The team will then mentor you through the process of creating your app, and testing it with users. This will take place over approximately 6 months, depending on the scale of your content.
Your app will be published alongside other apps for users to select and download from the new Once for Scotland mega-app, available from the app stores from July 2022.
Maintaining your app
The decision support programme will manage the technical maintenance and hosting of your app. You will be required to carry out regular reviews of the content and to ensure that it is up to date. You will also be expected to respond in a timely way to any user feedback.
When will this happen?
The team plan to provide initial training during August and September so that you can start building your app from October this year. Training will be held virtually via Microsoft Teams. There will be 6 training sessions in total, each lasting 1-1.5 hours, with some reading and practice in between sessions.
What do I need?
This opportunity is open to third sector organisations working to support and/or improve people’s health and wellbeing in Scotland. You must be a registered charity or another kind of voluntary/community organisation or a social enterprise. Applications from VHS member organisations are particularly welcome. No programming skills are needed, but please think carefully about the criteria below before expressing a formal interest – and do get in touch with Ann Wales (see below) if you have any questions ahead of applying.
To take part in this opportunity, you should have:
- A strong interest in organising and formatting information for easy digital access
- Basic skills in managing information.
- Content for at least 10 web pages as a starting point for populating your app. This is likely to need some restructuring for web access.
- At least 3 hours per week to give to this work for the duration of the project.
- Organisational commitment to promote and maintain the app
How do I register my interest?
Please email Claire Stevens Chief Executive, Voluntary Health Scotland, with the following details, by 5pm Wednesday 1st June 2022:
- Organisation’s name in full.
- Name, job title and email address of key contact.
- Names, job titles and email addresses of staff member(s) who will undertake the training and support.
- Purpose and audience for the app you want to create.
- Why your organisation wants to take part in this opportunity – up to 250 words.
- How the app will be maintained and supported after it goes live.
To find out more
Contact Dr Ann Wales Programme Lead, Knowledge and Decision Support, Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre
All the information above is also available as a downloadable document: Guidance for Applicants
