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Leadership and Skills

About work area

To enable service transformation as outlined in the Digital Health & Care Strategy we are committed to investment in the upskilling of digital skills for all staff across health and care and ensuring we embed digital leadership at all levels to make this happen.

Much of the work prior to COVID-19 involved engaging with partners and stakeholders across health and care to understand the complex landscape of digital skills levels and requirements, job roles, existing learning & development materials and resources, and in particular building the governance to start to pull this all together to create a programme to deliver our plans for digital skills and leadership. Since the onset of the pandemic, we have witnessed a huge increase in requirements, usage, and roll-out of digital platforms such as Near Me to deliver care, Microsoft 365 and Teams to support our communications, the need for digital solutions in care homes and the required digital support for health monitoring through our Remote Health Pathways.

To support the significant change in the way that that staff have had to work, a number of digital skills initiatives and access to learning and information were developed reactively at pace and scale. The impact of COVID-19 has shown that digital solutions and different ways of working (including home-working) can be successfully achieved at pace to ensure we continue to deliver the best possible service to our patients and service users. We will continue to invest and collaborate across health and care organisations to ensure that digital skills and leadership for our workforce is at the forefront of service design, delivery and transformation.

What the area does

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic forced us to reconsider how we could sustain and deliver our health & care services and re-think our plans for a  programme of work in order to meet the huge increase in demand. Much of this has required a digital solution.

We have created the Building Digital Skills & Leadership Programme Board that will oversee our programme of work as committed to in the Digital Health & Care Strategy and Delivery Plan.

The Programme Board includes a wide range of partners and stakeholders  including Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC), Local Government Digital Office (LGDO), supported Scottish Government, Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), NHS Boards, Digital Health & Care Institute (DHI), and Third Sector.

The Programme Board will be supported and informed by the Building Digital Skills & Leadership Secretariat and a wider Building Digital Skills & Leadership Reference Group to ensure we have comprehensive coverage and maximum collaboration across health and care organisations.

The Programme of work will provide foundational resources to help support building digital skills and leadership. Our strategic delivery will focus on four key areas of development:

  • Digital Leadership
  • Digital skills for specialised/IT workforce
  • Digital skills for wider/general workforce
  • Digital skills requirements for future workforce

The programme of work builds on a range of initiatives including:

  • Enabling and driving forward our aims to provide consistent fit-for-purpose access to learning pathways, resources, and materials for staff to ensure the right level of digital skills are tailored to the job that they do.
  • Working with policy makers, education providers and industry experts to ensure learning pathways and curriculum are inclusive of the appropriate digital skills content for now and in the future.
  • Building on widening our existing Digital Leadership programme and aims to create digital leadership across all levels of staff.
  • Developing further priorities and aligning these with the refreshed Digital Health & Care Strategy and Delivery Plan.

Example of Work done

Digital Leadership

The Digital Health & Care Leadership Programme (DLP) supports the development of leadership skills to influence the use of digital initiatives to enhance care, with each participant implementing a digital change in their service area. The programme was previously available to Nursing Midwifery & Allied Health Professionals (NMAHP) across Scotland but has been expanded in 2021/22 to be open to all sectors across health, care and the Third Sector. This will increase the capacity across Scotland in Digital Leadership leading to innovation in services and across organisation learning and development. Further information on the DLP can be found on the TURAS LEARN Digital Health and Care Leadership Programme site along with cohort projects.

At executive level there is a need for increasing digital leadership across health and care to drive a digitally enabled service redesign as set out in the Digital Strategy. There is work currently underway to have masterclass events to support this ongoing development and networking at this level.

Digital Skills

There are a number of priority areas to help promote and support digital skills of the workforce some of the key areas include:

Remote Consulting and Remote Health Pathways learning resource website.

New information is added to these sites regularly to support the workforce to better use Near Me across health and care and new pathways are being added in line with user feedback to develop additional learning resources as required.

You can find these sites here: Remote Consulting , Remote Health Pathways.

Professional Development Award in Technology Enabled Care

This learning programme is available across health and care to equip Scotland’s workforce with the knowledge and skills required to embed Technology Enabled Care into their practice while supporting positive health and wellbeing outcomes. With specific training in Technology Enabled Care; Using Digital Technology to support people in Health; Housing and Care Contexts; Technology Enabled Care: Response; Technology Enabled Care: Installation, Maintenance and Repair; and Technology Enabled Care: Call Handling. Further information can be found on Turas Learn

NHS Scotland M365 Skills Hub

This SharePoint platform has been developed to give NHSScotland workforce a one stop for relevant M365 resources and training. This includes webinars, updates on services and how to guides for the different apps. These apps, particularly the use of TEAMS has made a considerable impact on the design and delivery of services through the pandemic and will continue to develop the workforce. Work is currently underway to support this platform across all of health and care.

Further learning and resources are available on the Digital Health & Care Turas Learn site.

Our work

The Digital Health and Care Directorate is involved in a wide range of work across health.

Our Strategy

Scotland’s refreshed Digital health and care strategy was launched on 27th October 2021. A joint initiative between the Scottish Government and COSLA, it outlines approaches to improve the care and wellbeing of people in Scotland.