Digital Maturity
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, we expect that the DMA will be significant in the planned refresh of the Digital Health & Care Strategy later in 2021.
Planning is underway to take forward the next iteration of the digital maturity assessment as set out in the digital health and care strategy
Example of work done
Local Authorities and Health Boards, working with their Health and Social Care Partnerships, were invited to take part in Scottish Government & COSLA’s Digital Maturity Self-Assessment in April 2019 with a view of completing the assessment by the end of August 2019. 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 – Digital Maturity Assessment Summary
Findings for Health Boards – DHCS Digital Maturity Assessment – Health Board Results
Findings for Local Authorities – DHCS Digital Maturity Assessment – Local Authority Results