Overview
IFB Gaming supported NHS digital teams by contributing community-led usability insights to the NHS App, helping to advance national priorities around digital inclusion, health equity, and user-centred service design.
Our work aligns with NHS England’s commitment to reducing health inequalities, ensuring that digital transformation improves — rather than restricts — access to essential healthcare services for all communities.
Strategic Alignment
This work directly supports and complements the following NHS and UK policy priorities:
- NHS Long Term Plan – Tackling health inequalities and improving access to care
- NHS Digital Inclusion Framework – Addressing access, skills, confidence, and motivation
- What Good Looks Like Framework – User-centred, inclusive digital service design
- Core20PLUS5 – Focusing on populations most at risk of poorer health outcomes
- UK Government Digital Inclusion Strategy – Ensuring digital public services are accessible and usable for all
By grounding digital health improvement in lived experience, IFB Gaming helps translate policy intent into practical, community-informed action.
The Challenge: NHS App
The NHS App is a cornerstone of the NHS’s digital front door, enabling patients to access records, prescriptions, appointments, and communication in one place.
However, national evidence consistently shows that digital exclusion is closely linked to health inequality. Barriers such as low digital confidence, accessibility needs, language, device access, and trust in technology can prevent individuals from benefiting fully from digital health services.
The challenge was to ensure that the NHS App continues to evolve in ways that support inclusion, usability, and equity — particularly for individuals and groups often under-represented in conventional user research.
Our Approach
IFB Gaming applied an inclusive research and engagement model, aligned with NHS principles of co-production, accessibility, and user-centred design.
Our approach focused on:
- Engaging individuals affected by digital exclusion and health inequality
- Testing real user journeys within the NHS App
- Identifying barriers related to skills, confidence, accessibility, and trust
- Capturing qualitative insights aligned to the NHS Digital Inclusion Framework
- Translating lived experience into structured, evidence-based insights
This ensured feedback was both human-centred and policy-relevant.
What We Delivered
Through our engagement, IFB Gaming provided:
- Inclusive usability testing insights supporting NHS service improvement
- Evidence aligned to access, skills, confidence, and motivation domains
- Practical feedback on onboarding, navigation, clarity, and reassurance
- Community-rooted findings suitable for NHS design, delivery, and evaluation teams
- Research outputs that support continuous improvement and inclusive innovation
This work supported the NHS’s wider ambition to build digitally inclusive, equitable, and trusted health services.
The partnership has already seen transformative results:
- The NHS App now has 33.6 million registered users.
- A 32% increase in app engagement among non-native English speakers.
- Increased engagement with the voluntary sector and community organisations.
- Improved trust and confidence in digital healthcare among marginalised groups.
By centring voices from digitally excluded communities, IFB Gaming helped ensure that service insights reflected real-world experiences — supporting better-informed decisions across digital health delivery, accessibility, and engagement.
Why This Matters
As digital services become central to accessing healthcare, inclusion is no longer optional — it is essential.
This case study demonstrates how community-based research and inclusive engagement can strengthen NHS digital transformation, helping ensure that innovation improves outcomes for everyone, not just the digitally confident.
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About IFB Gaming
IFB Gaming is a research-led digital inclusion and community innovation organisation supporting public services, charities, and partners to design technology that works for diverse communities.
Our work spans digital health, education, gaming, and public services — combining policy alignment, community insight, and ethical technology practice to reduce digital and social inequality.