KELA is finnish Social Insurance Institution of Finland. KELA offers services and benefits for example; unemployment benefits, healthcare benefits, suppport families with children and social assistance those who need it. Me ad my family don’t use KELA services right now, but when I buy for example medicines, I can get those for sale because KELA pay part of it. I think that is huge benefit for all of us.
From Omakanta I find my recipes and if I had been at the doctor’s office, I can find the information on this visit. I use Omakanta quite often. It’s easy to use and I got in using my bank credentials.
When I’m 63 or 68 and going to retire, I would like to have much more pension than I get. Nurses don’t get rich in retirement because it’s so small for us 😀 . My retire age is 67. In my opinion, the retirement age should be lower even though life expectancy is increasing. I would like to enjoy my life then, not just be in bad shape.
I visited Trivago, which I know from its abundant commercials on TV. I’ve never actually used the service before, but I was aware it offers hotel price comparison services for travellers. Judging from the plentiness of the TV commercials alone, I think it’s safe to suggest the company has somewhat stable financial situation since that kind of amount of commercials costs. So, people must use its services quite a lot. As for the experience itself, Trivago seemed to me as an easy tool to compare hotel prices. When I selected one, it guided me to the website (Booking.com, for example) where the hotel was available for the said price. These websites were reliable, in my experience, and the price was the same as in Trivago. For these reasons, I would say Trivago is a reliable service. Of course, it has to be noted that the final price of the hotel may be different, depending on the choices being made (e.g. room type).
As a digital service of my own field, I chose Terveyskylä (Healthvillage.fi), which is a website offering a wide range of ”hubs” and paths for common people suffering from different kinds of illnesses and conditions. I chose this service because I’ve used it before to search for information for my own conditions, and I’ve sometimes guided people to search further information there, as well. In my opinion, Terveyskylä was easy to use; finding the desired hub or path was smooth, the information was clearly divided and one could find answers to all basic questions one might have, in my opinion. There were 32 different kinds of hubs (for heart, lung and kidney conditions, pain problems and male and female specific conditions, to mention a few) which all contained a lot of information about the subject. If the condition was likely to be operated at some point, the website offered information about the operation, as well. Aside from patients, the website also had different kinds of tools for professional use. Therefore, I think Terveyskylä is a very useful tool for both patients and professionals, offering easily accessible and reliable information which is easy for anyone to understand.
In Finland, most of the population is likely to be familiar with digital and virtual services, especially with the younger generations. The ones who fall out of this are usually older people. Middle-aged people may be a little stiff with different technologies since they haven’t grown up with them, but they usually know how to use them – while the oldest generations might not have seen anything in a digital form for the most part of their lives. Therefore, it might be very hard for them to adapt to the modern digitalized world.
In health care, it’s a growing trend to produce more and more digital services, from doctors’ and nurses’ appointments via video calls to robot assistance in different things, so it’s inevitable there are risks and challenges for those who do not use virtual services. For example, it might be difficult for them to get in touch with health care personnel at all, since many local health care centers offer less and less opportunities to meet face to face with customer service. Even reaching them by phone might be hard. In many cases, the easiest way to book an appointment nowadays is to book it in the Internet or with a specific app. Same goes with other common things in life, such as tickets and trips. If the older people aren’t very familiar with using mobile phones, it certainly would be very hard for them to find the specific app they need, download it, register and then learn how to use it.
The other clear challenge is finding information. These days, most of the information is in the Internet; shops, restaurants, events and government institutes all have their own websites where the latest information is being updated. People who don’t use the Internet are likely to have a very difficult time trying to find out the opening hours of a shop, for example; if they couldn’t go to the shop itself to check it, they would have to try and call the shop to ask, likely using a call centre first. In the modern world, it surely is difficult to function even in the most basic things without the use of digital tools and services.
Self evaluation
I think we are lucky in Finland that we have such a great systems like Kela, Omakanta and such good healthcare for everyone. While doing this task, I got deeper understanding how much we use digital tools in our everyday lives. I’m also worried about how older people can get healthcare if they can’t use computers. Our world is being built more digital all the time, but younger people can cope with it more easily.
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