Developing digital confidence in the NHS

As longer-term followers of the NHS Digital Academy and readers of our newsletter will know, the NHS Digital Academy is focussing on the development of digital and data confidence and competence in NHS staff as the single most impactful thing we can do.

This conclusion was first identified in our Learning Needs Analysis from last year and confirmed in recent surveys and interviews we’ve undertaken to understand pain points of NHS staff in more detail.

We’ve now had two meetings of a special interest group to discuss and build on these findings and the community has come together to undertake 56 interviews of NHS staff and the educators who serve them on a day-today basis in healthcare provider organisations.

What we’ve found out has been really eye-opening. Firstly, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how our educator community is composed – some of you deliver training whilst others develop it or lead education services. There are groups of you, both clinical and non-clinical, who are focussed more on the delivery of education around specific clinical technologies, particularly the Electronic Patient Record, and we identified that the IT helpdesk also plays a really significant role in signposting staff to relevant learning.

We know that these roles have varying levels of digital confidence themselves, but overall, we know the educator community would benefit from better data skills and better specialist educator skills such as use of specialist software, use of virtual technology or understanding of how to set up and maintain digital champions networks.

We identified some pretty big pain points as well. Educators reported that finding trustworthy, high-quality and accessible education is hard. Educators up and down the country are all, separately, searching for these assets – one of the key things you think we’re best placed to do on your behalf.

You’ve also reported difficulty (and, in some cases, lack of trust) in implementing self-reported assessments of digital skills. The biggest issues however, seem to be in what we might call ‘organisational constraints’ – things like staff reported time to train or lack of access to devices. Only 44% of clinicians and 46% of administrative staff said that they had time to undertake learning to build their digital skills. Whatever we provide centrally needs to take into account these significant constraints and I’m pleased to say that March’s group explored some good practice to do just that.

I would very much like to thank everyone who is contributing to this work and particularly if you’ve contributed ideas to our FutureNHS forum or if you’ve taken the time to run interviews adding to this body of knowledge. It’s been a phenomenal feat of co-production and we genuinely could not have done it without you.

We’re not quite at the stage to start prototyping new products and services to meet these needs, but we’re not a million miles away and we hope to be testing a couple of theories at our next special interest group in the early summer. If you’d like to get involved you can sign up here.