Public Health is happily a risk sensitive field. Deploying new technology to intervene in people’s lives is rightly treated with caution. The digital initiative was the new kid on the block with a lot to prove to some very sceptical scientists.

However the opportunity to do something, and the need in society is greater – we just needed to show impact.

We needed to prove that the promise was possible. We did this by showing the potential value of digital service to people. To people with debilitating stress and anxiety in London, to people running health check services in Manchester and to the people in PHE who needed faster evaluation results for their programs.

To prove the potential we worked with these people to understand their needs, create prototypes that proved value and deliver working tools like our evaluation tool. Once people see the potential and how it delivers on their needs they get behind the change.

Over our three year engagement we delivered six projects that together helped PHE to:

Prove the potential with a ground up new service, Goodthinking, that dramatically reduced the cost to support people with stress and anxiety and reported 180k users in the first year. 60% seeing a clinically verified reduction in stress after use.

Build the capability of the PHE team that went from three to twelve during the period and more importantly build the buy-in from public health colleagues who now know how to ‘do digital’.

Define the opportunity for the future through our work to explore, test and define a Digital Healthcheck service. Currently up and running in Southwark London and reporting

Since its launch in 2017, over 700,000 people have used the Goodthinking digital service to tackle anxiety, stress, low mood, sleep problems and other concerns. During Covid usage rose to an average of 1,667 users per day, over five and a half times the previous baseline.

The digital health check in Southwark is achieving the goal of addressing groups who can self-serve (younger and more healthy), freeing space in the GP service for more at-risk people whilst also reaching some who were not taking up the previous service. It is also achieving double the rates of take up compared to the face-to-face offer (21% vs 11%) and close to half the cost ( 44% that of the completed F2F).

The evaluation framework is now being used as intended to speed the evaluation and hence investment in digital public health. Faster feedback leads to service improvements and stronger investment cases.

Digital NHS Health Checks are to be rolled out in 2025 (due to evaluate evidence) via the NHS App aiming to deliver thousands of additional life enhancing Healthchecks.