Digital Skills.
For Health and Social care (HSC) staff.

As part of the developing HSC Digital Strategy 2022 – 2030 the priority to support a “workforce confidently using digital health technologies to deliver health and care” is highlighted.

DHCNI has committed to collaborating with care providers and partners in workforce education so that all health and social care professionals and the wider HSC workforce have access to resources that will support them in the confident and efficient use of digital health. In addition, the strategy will propose rapid promotion of a network of HSC digital leaders and champions across Northern Ireland.

All Ireland Digital Capability Framework

The All Ireland Digital Capability Framework for health and Social Care has been  created to:

• define the digital health knowledge, skills and attitudes required for professional practice
• complement existing individual knowledge, skill, and attitudinal frameworks
• provide a solid basis for tailored learning

The framework outlines the capabilities required to support individuals and organisations in extending their digital health development rather than providing a rigid set of competencies. It is intended to enable and inform and is not intended to be adopted as a professional standard but should be used as a resource to guide individuals, employers, and educators in their workforce and professional development planning and delivery. Most importantly, the framework intends to promote and encourage positive attitudes in relation to the increasing introduction and adoption of technology and innovation. Effort has been made to ensure that all professional groupings working within HSC can use the framework to assess their own capability across a range of digital health specific domains, and for employers to understand the digital health capability they should be supporting within their workforce.

In developing this resource, we foresaw the following intended uses.

The framework:

• is intended to be accessible and understandable across a broad range of healthcare contexts
• can be used by individuals to assess their own digital health capabilities and to identify learning and developmental needs or inform personal and professional development plans relevant to their current or future workplace or role
• can be used by health services as part of their continuous quality improvement activities to assess organisational capacity and educational requirements
• can be used to develop tools to assist in extending the digital health capabilities
• will provide direction for career advancement planning in digital health or informatics specialties

In addition, DHCNI are working with FEDIP to develop a framework for developing skills and career pathways for informatics professionals.