Digital Skills
The ability to generate, read, appraise, analyse and use and present digital content responsibly to aid operations, clinical practice, campaigns and resources, evaluation and decision-making.
What are the sub-capabilities?
- Technological skills and general platform knowledge
- Search engine optimisation and algorithmic literacies
- Platform analytics
- Platform vernacular and vocabularies (text and image)
- Content creation and distribution
- Participation in everyday digital cultures (ie. responding to comments under
campaign content)
What are the core questions?
- How is digital expertise and knowledge fostered and to what extent is it shared across the organisation?
- How are the roles and responsibility for maintaining/understanding/initiating) organisational digital identity and digital communication allocated communicated within the organisation?
- How is lived experience of digital technologies and cultures incorporated into organisational policy and practice relating to digital identity (including content creation)?
What do digital skills look like in practice?
CASE STUDY 01
During a planning day for the board, steering group and executive of Sexual Health Organisation (SHO), the leadership team sets ‘increase online outreach and engagement while young people’ as an organisational goal.
During a SWOT analysis, the group uncovers a shared assumption that ‘youthful’ staff (ie those aged under 30) are inherently capable of leading and managing digital projects, regardless of their training and specific domain expertise. This has resulted in low engagement (and poor return on investment) from past digital campaigns.
The leadership group work through the Digital and Data Models and Checklist to check this assumption, and realise adequate training and resources have not been allocated to build the capability of the current workforce.
Budget is allocated to allow existing health promotion staff to undertake suitable training and other professional development activities.
Within my organisation this [digital capability-building] would be flipped back to me: ‘You’re the health promotion person and you know technology. You can go and do this’. Because they’re just incredibly time-poor and I am the young person, so I hold all the information.
– (Health Promotion Professional, 18-29, DDCSRH)
CASE STUDY 02
During the 2020 COVID lockdowns, SHO launched an Instagram account in order to share sexual health content and build connections with young people. Over the past three months, Tai (a Health Promotion Officer) has noticed that engagement with SHO’s Instagram account has significantly declined.
Posts that used to gain 200 likes now rarely get more than 50 likes. He thinks that SHO’s Instagram account might be ‘shadow banned’ (ie Instagram has restricted the visibility of content without informing the account owner).
Tai researches other health services’ experiences of shadow banning, and learns that he has been using words that Instagram flags as ‘pornographic’ or ‘promoting sexual services.’ These include the words sex, pleasure, vagina, and clitoris.
He joins an informal ‘digital community of practice’ group chat to share strategies with his peers. He learns that many sex education and health promotion services are by content moderation, and some have developed workarounds.
To circumvent Instagram’s automated content moderation practices, Tai attempts to convey information in a way that is not detectable by an algorithm. Instead of using ‘scientific’ (but restricted) language, he uses ‘vernacular’ communication that is familiar to platform audiences.
This includes euphemistic language and double entendres; deliberate mis-spellings (ie ‘seggs’); animated GIFs (or short looping videos), and memes (viral combinations of text and images that circulate on digital platforms). He also uses trending catchphrases (like ‘demure and mindful’).
He finds that engagement increases in the short term, but also flags the issue with SHO leadership as sector-wide concern.
FAQs
What are everyday digital practices?
What is digital literacy?
Digital literacy can mean a lot of things. It can mean the ability to effectively use platforms on your computer – like Word, or Excel. It can mean possessing the skills to interpret digital content. Like being able to check the sources of internet information and to identify misinformation.
In sexual health literature and health research, it is often talked about in relation to health consumers, rather than health workforces.
Digital literacy is an important element of being able to engage with digital and data technologies and platforms for sexual and reproductive health. However, it doesn’t capture all of the elements necessary for sexual and reproductive health organisations and individuals to participate in and benefit from digital transformation.
For example, an individual staff member might be very digitally literate. They are able to effectively use digital technologies, but they work in an office with obsolete digital technologies. Or they might be great at creating digital health promotion content, but discover there’s a firewall blocking their access to the social media platforms used by target populations.
For this reason, we talk about digital and data capabilities – rather than literacies.
What kinds of tech skills and general platform knowledge do professionals use for SRH provision?
The tech skills you need will depend upon the type of technologies your organisation (and role) use. It might mean being able to use different platforms, like teams, to communicate with others in your organisation. It might be the ability to use digital forms for patient information and data. It can also be the very specific skills it takes to create and disseminate social media content.
We recommend you use our Checklist to help identify the skills and knowledge most relevant to your role/organisation.
When it comes to different social media platforms, the young adults we spoke to in our research did not necessarily require health care providers to know every detail about how every platform works, or to stay on top of all the latest social media trends.
But they did want an understanding from their health care providers of digital media as a valid site of lived expertise. This meant recognising and validating their social media practices as a way to support and affirm care.
“I use TikTok quite often [for sexual health] especially when it’s something super specific, a lot of people are relating to it or a lot of people have the same experience, so it’s cool seeing that there’s either quite a few videos or quite a few comments on a video and being able to think like, oh my gosh I experience the same thing. Especially when mainstream healthcare doesn’t really cover all aspects of sexual health”
– (Young adult 18-29 workshop participant, DDCSRH).
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