Month: May 2021

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Inside the incubator

Celebrating PRIDE: LGBTQ+ Health Matters and Why It Matters

In honor of Pride month, Vision Health Pioneers Incubator is taking the opportunity to give prominence to issues in the healthcare industry experienced by our friends in the LGBTQ+ community.

The Call For Inclusive Healthcare

Despite the many advances in healthcare today, access, representation and inclusivity in healthcare remain an issue of contention for the LGBTQ+ community. They continue to face significant challenges when accessing healthcare while also suffering a greater burden of particular health issues: depression, isolation, suicide, HIV/STIs and cancer.

The healthcare industry strives to inspire hope and to their best of their ability provide patient-centered healthcare. However, LGBTQ+ and minority patients continue to report experiences tainted by stigma, hate-violence and discrimination. Surveys have reported experiences that range from refusal to be seen, addressed with harsh or abusive language and misgendering amongst a disturbing list of other harassments and humiliations when seeking care.

This has unsurprisingly discouraged LGBTQ+ people from accessing healthcare. While LGBTQ+ community health centres and services do exist, they are not as widely available or easily accessed. There remains as well, a distinct lack of knowledge amongst healthcare providers on the correct anatomical language to create a safe space for all. As providers struggle to describe bodies and patients outside of gendered terms, this gap in communication has left a demographic of people feeling entirely unseen and unheard.

These barriers in accessing healthcare is a trauma in itself. Inadvertently, it contributes to the vulnerabilities and health risks of LGBTQ+ people who opt out of seeking medical attention for fear of being othered.   

A majority proportion of national health surveys that do not collect information on sexual orientation and gender identity poses as a furthered form of discrimination. Again, while there have been improvements and greater attention in recent years, there remains a distinct health data gap for LGBTQ+ people, with their specific health risks being left out entirely in what informs public healthcare.

 

Undoubtably there is a need for enhanced awareness amongst healthcare providers and greater community consciousness. In looking towards health innovations that could help fill the gap in healthcare for this community, digital health tools are emerging as essential.

Digital Health Tools and LGBTQ+ Health

In an era where digital communication is preferred, mental health innovations that allow for support via text and calls are providing a much needed space for people to reach out digitally in a moment of crisis. The increased anonymity through digital applications as well, allows for a wider spread and hopefully more inclusive demographic that will seek out support. Meet a few organisations that inspire:

Online platforms allow individuals to access culturally competent healthcare and come together in a digital safe space. For instance, sites such as Violet and EmptyClosets that allow members of the community to connect.

Also read more here on Foxl Health, the direct-to-consumer health startup designed with LGBTQ+ patients in mind and how other digital health startups are driving the change towards more inclusive healthcare.

Closer to home within our incubator, our Batch #2 team minime have been working on a self-monitoring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tool. It serves to introduce greater flexibility and ease of access in therapy and allows patients to self-monitor between sessions in a fun way.

Our Batch #2 team ALMA recognise the value of connection, education and dialogue. They are working on creating a community platform to tackle the stigmatised and often silenced issue of female intimate healthcare

A long road is still ahead

This shift towards digital health tools prioritising health education in an open, culturally relevant environment is an encouraging step towards greater inclusion in healthcare. While much work remains to be done, there is hope that the future holds improved healthcare prospects for the LGBTQ+ community.

To all the founders out there: KEEP THE NEEDS OF THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY IN MIND AND CREATE INCLUSIVE SOLUTIONS THAT EMBRACE ALL PATIENTS NEEDS.

 

Categories
Events

Walk This May with Us!

Walking Challenge

Are you still in hibernation? Wake up!  May is National Walking month and we, here at #VisionHealthPioneers Incubator are embarking on a Walking Challenge to cover a whopping 999kms!

Why 999km you might wonder? It is exactly the distance from Berlin to the UN Refugee Agency headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Because we are not “just walking”. Aside from taking the opportunity to enjoy Berlin at its most beautiful in spring, this May, we will be raising money towards the UN Refugee Agency’s COVID-19 Urgent Appeal Fund. For every 1km of this 999km, Vision Health Pioneers Incubator will match a 1 Euro donation totalling 999 Euro. 

Our Cause

We chose the UN Refugee Agency in recognition of the devastating impact COVID-19 has had on the world’s most vulnerable people. As the pandemic continues, COVID-19 has proven itself to be the greatest exposure of existing inequalities. While social distancing and hand washing may seem to a lot of us easy practices to follow, it is a privilege we take for granted. It assumes access to sanitation, running water and living spaces large enough to practice it.

Large proportions of the world’s refugee population live in cramped and impoverished camps or settlements, somewhere between their home countries and hopes of a better life. Even here in Germany their living conditions as they apply for asylum are crowded and rife with challenges.

The vulnerabilities that migrants and refugees experience run deep and have been in existence long before COVID-19.

It is with hopes that this global pandemic will in spite of all the suffering, bring to fore these structural inadequacies so that more people will be aware of the need to support these populations. The health of every person is linked to the health of the most marginalised and vulnerable members in a society. 

Join us to not only raise money but also awareness for the healthcare and realisation of refugee human rights.

The teams

All our Batch #2 startups are battling, the incubator team have also dusted off their walking shoes and are participating as The Hot Steppers. 

 

The first steps

Categories
Our Mentors Our Network

Mentor Johannes Steger on being present and owning your story

Johannes Steger is principal consultant and the current head honcho of communications at Plan D, a young technology and strategy consultancy actively shaping the face and experience of digitisation in the modern world, Plan D is Vision Health Pioneers’ most recent partner to come on board.

At ease in their spacious, industrial loft-style offices, Johannes is candid about the incredible journey of his career that has taken him from the buzzing tech startup scene of Tel Aviv as a journalist, to where he is today in Berlin. Despite having worked for many years as a tech journalist, Johannes humbly admits that his present role working with coding, engineers and data scientists has made him realise he knows nothing. That for him is an exciting revelation that he embraces as an opportunity to push himself out of his comfort zone. With this effortless capacity to step up to a challenge and an enthusiasm for all things tech, Johannes is a long-time champion of the startup community.

For him, startup culture poses as a powerful interrupter and driver of industry diversity.

The capacity of startup culture to birth forward-thinking founders and level the playing field through greater gender representation, is one that that he believes, “ultimately drives a country and the whole of Europe.”

On Mentorship and Giving Back

“I think everyone who works in this ecosystem has the obligation to do something good. We all profit from this great Berlin ecosystem but living this startup life and being in this ecosystem comes with the obligation of giving something back.”

As a mentor at Vision Health Pioneers, Johannes has facilitated workshops on vision, stakeholders and messaging. He has also contributed his time and presence facilitating the recent Batch #2 pitch event. For Johannes, his involvement with Vision Health Pioneers is not just an extension of his love for technology and his belief in the integral role technology and data has and will come to play in the health industry. Rather, as a participant of the Berlin startup ecosystem, it is his commitment to building up and enabling others to drive the ecosystem further. As a natural visionary, there is a bigger picture and greater good that he is working towards in his guidance and mentorship of new startups.

“Vision Health Pioneers incubator is not only diverse by way of culture, but also the various solutions the startups bring to health. It is amazing that there is an incubator giving power and room for ideas that are finally bringing attention to stigmatised topics such as mental health and female intimate health”.

 

On Visibility, Being Present and Stakeholder Management

When it comes to networking, visibility and messaging, Johannes does not sugar coat the importance it plays for early startups. However, his core take-home message is simple: concern yourself with the needs of others, not just yourself. “Visibility can also mean being in an audience and listening. Being present, listening, learning and not necessarily always engaging. Just be there and learn. It is not always about talking and present by way of ‘presenting’ yourself but ‘present and listening’. This for me is essential for networking and visibility”.

 

Johannes Steger: 5 principles for building and maintaining stakeholder relationships

 

On Purpose, Messaging and Owning Your Story

There is a commitment to truth and integrity that Johannes stresses must be upheld from purpose through to the messages that are conveyed, particularly within the healthcare industry. Here, he is quick to draw the distinction between up-selling pizza and healthcare solutions. While there is an end-user in both instances, when it comes to health, it is important to bear in mind that a life is dependent on it.

“In communicating something about your product, you have to be very sure what you say and promise. Don’t promise anything you cannot keep, because even if the consequences of embellishment or false promise are not deadly, it is a pain that a person at the other end is feeling, be it a mental pain or a physical one”.

With regards to purpose, it is important for healthcare startups to not be solely profit-driven, but to be clear on what drives the innovation.

“With Vision Health Pioneers Incubator, every founder seems to have a personal relationship to the product they are building. When guiding the teams, I often tell them to use their personal story in their communications. It does not only have to be ‘I am suffering’, but it could also be, ‘I saw someone else’s suffering.”

 

At the recent Pitch event, his guidance was evidenced in the stories put forth by the young startups. Beyond open and honest, this authentic voice that Johannes encourages in communication is a bold declaration that gives a voice to invisible and stigmatised issues in healthcare. Putting these stories out there not only fosters connection. It holds the immense power to create dialogue, give hope and forge role models and leaders out of an idea born from one person’s story.