Digital Maturity
Digital Maturity Assessment
Read the latest update and information for participants, and the summary results of the Digital Maturity Assessment 2023 for NHS Boards, Health and Social Care Partnership’s and Local Authorities.
The Scottish Government and COSLA Digital Maturity Assessment Survey supports the shift to embed digital ways of working as a pre-requisite to improving outcomes in health and social care.
The web-based platform supports organisations to:
- regularly review the various sections within the survey, track progress and plot change over time;
- produce reports for planning and reporting purposes, including business cases;
- compare organisational results to national averages;
- inform national planning, co-ordination and priority setting.
In April 2023, all NHS Boards, Health and Social Care Partnership’s and Local Authorities were invited to participate in the survey. The online platform re-opened in October 2023, with the move to a continuous operating model, allowing organisations to plot results in a time series. The platform is now available at any time.
Social Care Organisations - Third and Independent Sector
Following a successful pilot of the digital maturity assessment, we have developed a separate digital maturity platform for social care organisations operating in the third and independent sectors.
Organisations who registered were recently sent access details.
The survey is divided into three sections across a range of topics. There is also a staff survey, which while anonymous, will enable you to understand staff members experience and their learning requirements across a range of care settings.
A range of tools to facilitate collaboration in answering the sections is available within the platform itself.
If your organisation would be interested in having access to the platform, please register your interest.
We are running monthly Support Workshops. If you have any questions please contact marion.logan@gov.scot.
About work area
Our work on understanding digital maturity across health and social care in Scotland is focused on the following objectives:
- To better understand digital maturity of services across the sectors to better support local, regional, and national planning, integration, collaboration, and improvement.
- To target future support and investment to ensure that the necessary leadership, culture, skills, capability, and infrastructure are in place to enable progress and improvement.
- It is intended to complement other digital maturity assessments developed by Scottish Government Digital Directorate, Local Government Digital Office, Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) and other parties.
- To consider digital maturity in the context of health and social integration while recognising that delivery of digital services is currently the separate responsibility of NHS Boards and Local Authorities.
What the area does
In 2019, Scotland undertook its first digital maturity assessment across health and social care. All 14 territorial health boards, 6 special health boards and 22 Local Authorities completed the assessment and feedback about the process was extremely positive.
Unfortunately, much of the work planned to take forward the learning from the assessment was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, work was resumed in 2022-23 and a summary report of the digital maturity results published in December 2023, as set out in the Digital Health and Care Strategy.
Example of work done - 2019 Digital Maturity Assessment
In 2019, local authorities and NHS Health Boards, working with their Health and Social Care Partnerships, were invited to take part in the Scottish Government and COSLA’s Digital Maturity Self-Assessment (DMA).
The assessment was completed using a dedicated online data collection platform customised to accommodate the needs of Scottish health and care organisations. Organisations were encouraged to engage with their leadership teams and health and care stakeholders via tools provided by the platform, and in workshops, to give the assessment a solid informational basis. All organisations had access to the platform’s staff survey feature, allowing them to query responses from a wider staff group on a short selection of key questions from the DMA.
A follow up exercise was undertaken with 19 Health Boards to gather feedback about the DMA process, to understand the degree of stakeholder engagement in the process, to discuss preliminary results, and to gather additional information relating to the responses given as part of the assessment. Feedback was also gathered about current ways of working with other Health Boards, Local Authorities and Health and Social Care Partnerships, in addition to discussing successes, challenges and opportunities for improvement, as part of the follow up meetings.
Summary of findings across Health and Care 2019 – Digital Maturity Assessment Summary
Findings for Health Boards 2019 – DHCS Digital Maturity Assessment – Health Board Results
Findings for Local Authorities 2019 – DHCS Digital Maturity Assessment – Local Authority Results