دانلود کتاب به سوی اکولوژی دیجیتال

At first, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. I had passively absorbed the coronavirus news from China, but only insofar as it formed part of my daily intake of Radio 4 news, as I got ready for work. Even when cases reached the UK, it still seemed quite remote with no particular personal salience. When my boyfriend and I went away for a seaside weekend mid-March break, we happily stood at the bar next to fellow customers and walked along the bay bustling with people taking in the chilly spring sun. Government ministers were still debating whether to permit large gatherings, and the official position determined that closing schools or sporting events could do more harm than good.1 As I started writing this book less than a month later, a BBC News alert popped up on my mobile telling me that the UK’s daily death toll of 980 has surpassed that of Italy and Spain. The newsreader announces that gatherings of not more than two were banned. Shit got real. But just as it took a while for the penny to drop in our personal lives, so did the enormity of the implications for the digital health sector and the National Health Service take some time to sink in. As I began to write this preface, the pandemic was in full force and its implications beyond the immediate days and weeks, still very much unknown. As I concluded the final chapter, one long year later, the impact of the pandemic on technology adoption in England’s NHS has been the subject of much debate, both within the sector and in any number of policy and research papers. Having worked in and around the NHS for most of my working life, I am endlessly fascinated by its culture, organisation and idiosyncrasies. I have always been drawn to knotty problems, and it is probably for this reason I have found myself working in digital health. Digital in the NHS is still immature and emergent (we’ll come back to that as a core theme in this book) but with the NHS engulfed by the biggest public health challenge of its 70 years, it appeared to come into its own. After personal protective equipment (PPE), a term most of us had never heard of before, digital appeared to be front and centre of rapidly shifting practices over the course of the first pandemic wave.