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Supporting our Digital Experts
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This work focuses on the products, services and offerings specifically aimed at the digital workforce (circa 45,000 in number) and central to this is the establishment of the professional landscape, including membership bodies.
We have established the Faculty of Clinical Informatics, a body for clinicians who are involved in digital change. The Faculty has over 800 members and provides a home for this group, offering professional standards, accreditation, networks, special interest groups, webinars and conferences.
We are also supporting the establishment of the Federation for Informatics Professionals (known as FEDIP) an umbrella body collaboration between several informatics membership organisations supporting digital experts. FEDIP has created a framework of professional standards and runs a voluntary professional register. FEDIP have also published a summary of findings from their recent consultation (May/June 2021) "Becoming The Profession".
Supporting collaborative communities is an important part of this workstream. For example, we are creating a re-usable regional ‘skills development network’ for expansion nationally and have helped establish The Shuri Network for women of black and minority ethnic backgrounds who are in digital health roles. We are investigating the large number of professional networks currently operating to see how we might enhance these, under our Connected Communities project.
We are jointly producing an ‘ISDN Toolkit’ to help expand the successful Regional Informatics Skills Development Networks based in the North West and Yorkshire & Humber into other regions. We will also work with regions to help bring together stakeholders and can offer a tailored package of support for new regions for up to two years.
In 2019/20 the workstream carried out research into career pathways. In early 2020 it also worked with the Government Digital, Data and Technology profession to hold two ‘unconferences’ with DDaT staff titled ‘How do we attract and retain the best talent’. Following on from this, we are working to understand and define digital roles and associated career pathways in conjunction with the Government Digital, Data and Technology profession (DDaT) and using the SFIA+ framework.