Building our Future Digital Workforce

Background

Digital technology and the application of data and information are having increasingly prominent roles in the transformation of health and care services in England. An ambitious future has been envisaged for the NHS by the Topol Review whereby health service delivery and preventive healthcare will be technology and data driven. Realising this ambition will require a digital technology and health informatics workforce (the ‘digital workforce’) in the NHS capable of supporting and sustaining the transformation of health services.

The Digital Readiness programme in HEE has released a report on the capacity and capability challenges facing the NHS digital workforce in the next 10 years – Data Driven Healthcare in 2030. The report highlighted that in a data-driven future the NHS digital workforce overall will need to significantly increase in size – by around 70% between 2020 and 2030 – and will require a greater proportion of professional staff with specialist or advanced qualifications and skills working in emerging and new job roles. Staff with these qualifications and skills will be in-demand across the economy.

Workforce plans

HEE would like to work with digital, human resources (HR) and organisational leads in local or regional NHS organisations to address these capacity and capability challenges.

This involves looking at three main workforce supply factors affecting the digital technology workforce:

1. education and training pipelines
2. recruitment and retention
3. professional development (reskilling and upskilling).

The aim is to develop a set of national workforce plans for different segments of the digital technology workforce.

These segments are:

1. data, information management and informatics
2. information and communications technology
3. technology-supported organisational transformation.

How digital leads, HR and organisational leads can contribute

This crowdsourcing platform will be the main conduit for collecting your feedback on supply for the different segments of the digital technology workforce. Stage 1 of the process is a call for evidence. This requires a submission (where possible) of the following:

• Case studies, policies or documentation on local or service level supply initiatives relating specifically to the digital technology workforce in your organisation or region.
• Feedback on the challenges involved in developing the digital technology workforce
• Feedback – including ideas, suggestions, best practice, etc – on the supply factors for each segment of the workforce.

Evidence and any feedback submitted will be treated in confidence and anonymised at the reporting stage of this project. The call for evidence will be open for x [weeks/months] and close on [date]. We will then analyse the information submitted, and if required, seek further details through online surveys, workshops and/or interviews.