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Guest blog announcing the Tech Against Trafficking Accelerator Program

There are few facets of modern life that are untouched by technology.  Innovations in the industry have changed the way we communicate, the way we work, the way we conduct commerce, and the way we address global issues like human trafficking and modern slavery.  

Modern slavery is a complex, thriving crime with a global foothold, affecting an estimated 40.3m people. It manifests in a myriad of different forms, necessitating a wide range of increasingly creative responses and preventive approaches.  Against this context, a coalition of technology companies have joined the collaborative initiative Tech Against Trafficking, for which Business for Social Responsibility™ (BSR) serves as the Secretariat and the RESPECT Initiative as the Research Lead. 

To further Tech Against Trafficking’s work, the collaborative initiative recently launched an Accelerator Program, which aims to identify promising uses of technology in the anti-trafficking field and to harness the expertise & resources of member companies to advance and scale the work of the organizations deploying technology to assist victims, law enforcement, business, and civil society.  

Girlguiding South West England have partnered up with the NCSC and GCHQ to produce badges for activities in cyber skills.

The new badges can be collected by those who complete activities from the new resource created by Girlguiding South West England and the National Cyber Security Centre, a part of GCHQ. 

The resource, called ‘On the net’, includes a range of activities for girls to complete within their units after which the badges can be collected.  Staged with levels to cover all ages within Guiding, from Rainbows to Rangers, the activity pack is designed to increase awareness among young women of the need to stay safe online. 

In GCHQ’s centenary year, the resource incorporates aspects of the NCSC’s successful CyberFirst  initiative, which has seen in excess of 24,000 young women engage in cyber security challenges.  The new partnership is part of the ongoing efforts to engage a younger audience in cyber security and in particular increase awareness among women. 

Blog posted by: Dr Pauline Whelan, Co-Director, CAMHS.Digital, 3 July 2019.

Can people develop feelings towards a robot therapist that are equivalent to those developed towards a human therapist?   Should we worry more about sharing our mental health data compared with our physical health data?   Will digital technologies replace human clinicians?  Should we embed Artificial Intelligence (AI) in clinical decision-making tools or would AI make bad, biased decisions about our healthcare?   Is the importance of human contact lost from clinical encounters when new digital technologies are introduced (and does it matter if it is)?  Such questions are often lumped together in a general panic about introducing digital innovation in healthcare.

These and other questions are explored in Reform’s recent report on data-driven mental healthcare.  The report talks us through the importance of using data to improve healthcare and helps us understand how #datasaveslives.  It also shows that successful transformation relies on building trust with patients & practitioners.

 This can only be achieved through rigorous research and a team science approach.  We need to work with people to explore the risks, benefits & challenges of digital health technologies and data sharing.

What are the conditions that satisfy a social license for data sharing so that people feel safe to share their data for healthcare purposes? The Connected Health Cities programme ran Citizens’ Juries to explore how healthcare data could be used in a way that people found acceptable.  Building trust & transparency around sharing health data is key. 

We need to use novel ways to explore with people how digital technologies can be usefully embedded in healthcare contexts.  A large scale hospital simulation game, like enTRUSTed can be used to explore how digital tools and data analytics can be integrated into complex systems.  This allows to brainstorm the digital possibilities across many areas, from process optimisation to patient-facing applications. 

The HoL Economic Affairs Committee has published its report - Social care funding: time to end a national scandal.

The report recommends that the Government immediately spends £8bn to restore social care to acceptable standards and then introduces free personal care over a period of 5 years.

The Committee found that publicly funded social care support is shrinking, as diminishing budgets have forced local authorities to limit the numbers of people who receive public funding.  Funding is £700m lower than 2010/11 in real terms, despite continuing increases in the numbers of people who need care.  More than 400,000 people have fallen out of the means test, which has not increased with inflation since 2010.

Social care funding is unfair; “The whole system is riddled with unfairness. Someone with dementia can pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for their care, while someone with cancer receives it for free”.  In addition, national funding for social care is distributed unequally across local authorities.

The funding shortfall has meant local authorities are paying care providers a far lower rate for local authority-funded care recipients than self-funded care recipients, and those care providers with a high proportion of local authority-funded care recipients are struggling to survive.

To address unfairness in the system the Committee proposes bringing the entitlement for social care closer to the NHS by introducing free personal care, which would include help with washing, dressing or cooking.