My other concern is that, although the pandemic undoubtedly made us all more digital, we are not all exclusively digital. It’s that variation in digital literacy or accessibility by individual, and even audience segment, that concerns me when we are talking about healthcare communications. We are communicating about health. And ethically we should strive to ensure inclusion of everybody in the target audience. When you add that some of the patient groups most in need of healthcare are potentially some of the most digitally unconnected, for a variety of reasons, then in our communications can we really accept that a digital-only approach is ethical?

Does the data support my concerns? Well, most definitely, yes, but you need to dig and think deeper than just the headlines. You will easily find amazing figures suggesting well over 90% of adults in the UK are recent internet users. But ask yourself, what does that mean, what are they using it for and where are they using it? You may then start to recognise this does not mean 90% of adults will be in a position to access/capitalise on your digital activity. Use may be very limited, they may only use it at work or they may only access it at a public library.

When you uncover data that is much harder to find, often because it does not exist or costs a fortune to obtain, you can identify a few quantitative examples to support those qualitative-driven concerns. Last September, Age UK shared its concern, backed by its research data, that ‘although many older people fully embrace the digital world, digital exclusion increases with age’. It concluded ‘almost six million people (5,800,000) aged 65+ are either unable to use the internet safely and successfully or aren’t online at all’. And if we really consider social media use in these age groups, whatever the top-line stats might say, do we really think the majority of those 65+ are avid social users, absorbing buckets of health information, or do we think they occasionally WhatsApp their family or perhaps go onto Facebook to check when the community library opens?

Where am I going with this? ‘One size does not fit all’ is as true for digital as with anything else. I have always felt that part of the issue is when people started talking about a ‘digital strategy’.

Nobody ever really used to talk about a print strategy. The use of that phrase is appropriate in some instances but, more often in communications, digital should not be the strategy, it is the vehicle or tactic through which we achieve our objective and strategy. That nuance is really important, because if we focus our objective and strategy purely on what we are trying to achieve, not tactically how we are going to do it, we will need to consider a range of channels to deliver our messaging inclusively. Practically, for example, when you go to a restaurant and the menu and ordering is accessible via QR code, it will still have a paper menu available and physical cash and card machine. This is what inclusivity is about, it’s not about avoiding the digital option, it is about ensuring we haven’t over-digitalised to the exclusion of some.

This may feel obvious to you, but we have generations of communicators now taking more senior strategic roles who have been brought up hooked to the internet and social media and consequently can see digital as the communications panacea. Today that’s potentially not going to effectively support significant proportions of our target populations with health needs. We therefore always need to ensure we are thinking more broadly than just digital, at least for the next decade, and then maybe we can reassess.

Mike Dixon is CEO of the Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) and a communications consultant