Improving the digital literacy of your workforce

As technology rapidly evolves, the health and social care workforce must be fully competent, confident and capable of using it in the workplace

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Health Education England

It is key that practices have high standards of digital capabilities and a positive attitude towards technology and innovation. In order to achieve this, practices need to ensure their workforce is digitally literate.

Digital literacy is fundamental to delivering safe, effective and person-centred 21^st century care. It is underpinned by getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time as. It is also about people in the workforce, and those in training, being comfortable, confident and feeling better-equipped to work in a digital environment.

In order to achieve this, there needs to be easy to access learning and development for all in the health and social care sector. Importantly, this needs to include both specialist content (for example, genomics or AI as subjects) and more generic content (such as prescribing patient apps, or professional social media use).

How to do this?

A self-assessment diagnostic tool, underpinned by the Health and Care Digital Capabilities framework, will be used to support individuals to identify their digital skills learning needs; they will then be intelligently signposted to appropriate learning resources. Work is also underway to create Profession and Service-Specific Digital Capabilities frameworks.

To support local ownership of digital skills learning and further skills’ development for some learners, resources to guide the establishment of digital champions are being created.