Foreword

A clear need for our healthcare workforce is to continually adapt to meet the needs of the society it serves.

Following the publication of the Topol Review in 2019, which set the vision of the NHS to prepare the healthcare workforce to deliver the digital future, Health Education England (HEE) commissioned the University of Manchester to perform a learning needs analysis and develop a framework outlining the skills and capabilities to ensure our health and care professionals can work in a digitally enhanced environment. This is part of our wider efforts to co-create reforms in healthcare education and training, whilst ensuring we best support the development of a workforce which responds to changes in healthcare now and in the future.

During the coronvirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we have seen implementation of digital technologies at a faster pace and scale than we ever imagined and have observed how admirably the health and care workforce have adapted to the changes around them. As we expect to see further developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, and digital healthcare technologies, it is important that we understand the skills and capabilities the system would need to embed these into existing learning and training pathways. These skills and capabilities should allow our health and care staff (and learners) to work safely and effectively with these technoloies in a digitally transformed health and care system. 

HEE has recently launched Enhance - the enhancing generalist skills programme, to allow those working in all disciplines to work effectively to meet patient and citizens needs, in the context of improving the health and wellbeing of local populations. Generalist approaches address the needs of the wider system, preparing our staff to work in integrated care systems to understand place-based, population health principles, and to deliver health and care to the local communities around them. The programme will champion person-centred approaches to care, flexible ways of working to manage complexity and co-morbidity, promote social justice, health equity and environmental sustainability. Digital is a cross cutting theme of the programme, with emphasis places upon being able to critically appraise and champion innovations and digital health technologies to promote and transform sustainable improvements in healthcare. It is pleasing to see several of these themes present in the Capability Framework.

This report presents the framework to allow educators and learners to identify learning needs required to utilise digital healthcare technologies encountered in the workplace, whilst considering the human, social and ethical aspects implications of their use. It presents case studies demonstrating the active role of these technologies in our health and care system and provides valuable understanding of the skills and capabilities that can form part of future training and curricula. It is part of a series of outputs from our Digital, AI and Robotic Technologies in Education programme (DART-Ed); future work will present an education strategy around AI building on this framework and the user archetypes that are presented. I would like to thank the DART-Ed team and the University of Manchester for their collaboration and hard work that has led to the development of this framework and everyone who engaged with the workshops and survey that helped build the evidence to shape it.

Professor Adrian Brooke
Medical Director

Workforce Alignment, NHS Health Education England
MB ChB, BSc (Hons), MRCHP(UK), FRCPCH, MD