Government | Sunday 8 February, 2015 7:37 am |

In partnership with the Government Summit, Thomson Reuters will launch its report ‘Innovation in Government Services’ highlighting innovative services, key trends and programmes offered by select governments, during the third summit which begins on February 9, emphasizing the position of the Government Summit as a global platform to share knowledge and experiences to develop governments of future.

The report focuses on the sectors of Education, Health and Social Services to deliver qualitative insights on key issues to be discussed during the summit.

Innovation in Education Services
In the education sector, the key innovation themes cover innovations that are technology driven, process driven, as well as collaboration driven. The report states that innovation hubs at universities all over the world have been getting university students and faculty engaged in tangible social impact. Among the benchmark group, USA has the highest number of top 500 universities supported by strong government engagement.

The report says a number of innovative government programs are being focused on addressing equal access to opportunity across income, race, and geography within the benchmark countries. A key program is ACCESS, a US based program focused on improving performance of students in rural Alabama through innovative programs like distance learning and video conferencing.

The report highlights the potential of Education Partnerships Program in Canada to improve the performance of elementary and secondary students from the First Nations community, which has historically been a disadvantaged community, both in terms of access to quality education and their lower income in relation to other communities throughout Canada.

Health Care Innovation
The report states that while the increased life expectancy of citizens is a testament to the success of governments, it also presents a new set of challenges. Governments are responding to the challenge of shifts in population demographics and social characteristics through innovations covering effectiveness, cost, equity, and convenience, it says.

All the governments identified in the report face the challenges of shifting population demographics and social characteristics. Other difficult areas are balancing savings and costs while improving quality in addition to the changing priorities in healthcare delivery in favor of managing chronic disease within health and wellness schemes.

Singapore has the highest health-adjusted life expectancy age of 76 within the group as well as the lowest infant mortality rate of 2/1000 births. The report says that country’s health system spends more resources in preventing disease, rather than treating disease. As a result, the country has low number of hospital beds per 1000 people, despite the highest number of physicians per 1000 people.

Innovation in Social Services
A variety of socio-economic and demographic trends across nations are determining their social services priorities. With the increase in life expectancies in developed countries, an aging population creates a strain on the people and the system that takes care of them, the report states.

According to the report, rising unemployment trends across industries and communities poses another challenge to governments. More citizens require social services like subsidized housing and food, access to affordable health care, retraining and counseling for reentry to the workforce, it states.

In a time of unprecedented global interconnectivity, demographic shifts and socio-political movements, governments are under tremendous pressure to adapt to the changing needs of its populations in agile and efficient ways. Innovations that deliver new solutions to existing challenges in a sustainable commercial way were once the domain of high-tech start-ups. Today, leading Governments are fast learning and adapting practices from the innovative private sector experience to solve the most challenging problems of their citizens, the report says.