Current opportunities

A key recommendation from the Lancet and Financial Times Commission report on Governing health futures 2030: Growing up in a digital world was to build a governance architecture that creates trustin digital health by enfranchising patients and vulnerable groups. 

To enable young people to co-design and critically engage with digital health ecosystems, governments should enfranchise communities, advance public participation in all stages of digital health policy and technology development and invest in combined digital, health and civic literacy or digital health citizenship.

The Digital Transformations for Health Lab (DTH-Lab) and PLOS Digital Health are partnering to (a) expand and diversify the evidence base for equitable digital first health systems that respond to the diverse health needs and priorities of young people; (b) build the capacity of young people to shape scientific research and policymaking for better digital health futures; and (c) cultivate youth leadership through the promotion of young thought leaders on issues related to digital and health governance.

This mini-collection, “Digital health citizenship: Advancing digitaltransformations for health and democracy” focuses on building a body of research and diverse perspectives on the concept of digital health citizenship and its application in different contexts. Young authors (under 35 years) are invited to contribute opinion articles on what digital (health) citizenship means to them and how current and future generations can become more empowered citizens and leaders. This mini-collection also aims to showcase lessons learned from current initiatives to build digital health citizenship, and barriers that must be overcome so more young people can obtain the skills,
resources and opportunities to fulfill their potential roles as digital health citizens. This could include but is not limited to:

• Opinions and viewpoints on digital health citizenship in action, highlighting success stories and lessons learned
• Analysis of effective tools and resources for digital health citizenship (or ones that could be applied to health)
• Highlighting barriers to young people meaningfully engaging in digital health citizenship
  
  

With a key objective of hearing from youth voices, particularly from LMIC, this mini-collection seeks submissions from authors from the Global South – particularly from countries with high youth populations.

The partners are excited to capture the experiences of young people and feature them as authors through a mini-collection of opinion articles that will follow the journal’s usual submission and peer review process.