Health Informatics Career Pathways Project

Background

The focus on digital, technology and data within healthcare continues to rise. More than ever, there is a significant need to ensure we have a workforce who are both skilled and knowledgeable alongside creating the conditions to ensure individuals can put those skills and knowledge to good use and have the confidence they can progress with a career should they wish to do so. Without a better understanding of this, the NHS will continue to face recruitment and retention problems in this area, and individuals risk not putting their skills to good use.

HEE’s Building a Digitally Ready Workforce Programme has commissioned a report with the aim of understanding how recruitment and retention (including progression) for health informatics can be improved by learning from the experiences of our existing workforce. The recommendations will primarily be aimed at those who have national or local responsibility for the informatics workforce. The research will also guide CIOs and boards to develop the profession within their own organisations with nationally-focused recommendations to support and enable this. The full report will make interesting reading to anyone within the profession.

The report has been published (see below) and makes recommendations across the following five areas requiring improvement across the NHS:

• Articulating health informatics career pathways across the NHS

• Nationally-supported recruitment and retention

• Defining the professional body offer and understanding health informatics network opportunities

• Regional/System approaches to developing an informatics workforce

• What can senior leaders do now?