Building workforce digital confidence and competence: What works and what doesn’t

Last month the NHS Digital Academy went to HETT and conducted a workshop with educators working in the NHS on what works and what doesn’t in building workforce digital confidence and competence.

It was incredibly well attended – not a free seat in the venue, and the quality of contribution was excellent.

It was clear that organisations are trying all sorts of things to support their colleagues to upskill in digital, we identified 11 significantly different activities, with two biggies most popular: Digital Champions initiatives and bite-size elearning. Thankfully both of these are recognised as best practice by the recent evidence review published by FuturedotNow.

However, we saw relatively few instances where educational impact was being recorded.

There were some ambitions to connecting digital education to clinical safety (one delegate passionately stated "people will literally die if we don’t invest in this") but little measurement outside of traditional activity and immediate knowledge retention metrics.

The workshop went on to explore set-up, key pain points and the areas where the Digital Academy could add the most additional value.

The biggest ask here was for the NHS Digital Academy to provide a curated source of elearning for local organisations to use and to support digital skills into clinical curricula.

I'm pleased to say that both of these items are on our forward plan and correlate with the findings of our recent discovery work, hosted on our FutureNHS community which you are welcome to join.

This work will contribute to the work we’re doing on creating a toolkit and guidance for local NHS provider organisations on how best to support their workforce to develop digital and data confidence and competence. Keep your eyes peeled for more news soon.