The NHS needs a digitally savvy workforce to ensure its survival
Fascinating story this and particularly interesting to rural places where more IT savvy approaches can overcome some of the challenges of remoteness. It tells us:
Healthcare is an information rich industry. As clinicians, the more information we have, the more able we are to make the best decisions for our patients. What we need is a cadre of digitally skilled healthcare professionals who can make the right information available to the right people at the right time. If we do this, we can deliver huge benefits to patient care. For example, electronic prescribing, which supports doctors and nurse practitioners to prescribe medications accurately by making information – including patient allergies – available wherever they go, have been shown to reduce sometimes fatal medication errors by up to 50%.
A 2016 Chief Clinical Information Officers Network survey of its members revealed that 76% of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed that the NHS has enough clinicians trained in health information technology and informatics. There are pockets of excellence across the NHS but the landscape as a whole is disjointed.
Many NHS chief clinical information officers and chief information officers have developed careers in a piecemeal fashion. If the NHS is serious about digital transformation then we need to raise our game and strive for excellence in training. Investing in technology is important but equally important is investing in the people tasked with making it work for clinicians and patients.
A report published by a House of Lords select committee (pdf) in April, following a year-long inquiry into the long-term sustainability of the health service, concluded that the biggest internal threat to its future is the lack of strategy to secure an appropriately skilled, well trained and committed workforce.
Which is why we launched the NHS Digital Academy – in partnership with Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh and Harvard Medical School – at the Health and Care Innovation Expo in Manchester.
The academy will offer – for the first time – a national, fully funded and world-class programme of education that will upskill NHS managers and clinicians to drive through the transformation the health service needs. They will learn about leadership and change management, health informatics and data analytics, health systems and user-centred design and citizen informatics, to name a few. Applications for the programme will open later this year and it will kick off early next year.