Explore the global challenges of digital transformation in healthcare, the importance of supporting frontline staff, and the effectiveness of different digital working frameworks through international insights.
Digital transformation is changing the way care is being delivered globally, and that brings specific challenges to those who are supporting frontline healthcare staff to do their work in the new contexts. With this, frameworks intended to support digital working by healthcare staff have been proliferating around the world.
On Wednesday 28th February the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) hosted a webinar featuring an international panel of experts in digital health to launch an international review and analysis of said frameworks intended to support digital working by frontline healthcare staff. The webinar panel was chaired by Professor Lesley Holdsworth (the Clinical Lead for Digital Health & Care at the Scottish Government), and she was joined by Mr Crispin Scotter (HRH Policy Advisor at the World Health Organization), Dr Louise Schaper (Director of Comperio Pty and the former CEO of Australasian Institute of Digital Health), and Dr Ann Wales (Programme Lead, for Knowledge and Decision Support from Healthcare Improvement Scotland). The report and its findings were presented by Dr Sanna Rimpiläinen, the DHI’s Head of Research and Skills and the lead author of the report.
The new report generated a lot of attention with almost 100 health workforce leaders from around the globe tuning in to hear the insights and recommendations from this research. The report could be characterised as a reader’s digest to frameworks used to support digital upskilling of frontline healthcare staff, pointing to different approaches taken to achieve this in different countries.
The main recommendations of the report boil down to a request to not reinvent the wheel but to select one of the existing well-developed and robust frameworks for use by organisations. The report recommends organisations to consider which upskilling approach works best for their purposes; assess the digital maturity of their healthcare context and where it is headed to, and what the digital upskilling needs of their workforce are.
This brought about a discussion by the panel, who were all in agreement supporting the report’s findings and contributing with experiences from their respective roles and positions. The discussion reinforced the relevance of the newly published work which appeared to be welcomed by the attendees.
We wish to thank each and every one of the panel members and attendees for taking time and interest in our work and joining us. We are excited for you to read the report and share it onwards, hopefully, inspiring debate about future pieces of work and training opportunities for the workforce across health and care.