Identifying Skills and Training Needs of the Connected Health Cities Programme
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Numerous NHS policies (e.g. Five Year Way Forward, Wachter Review) have highlighted the importance of developing informatics and data skills in the workforce to facilitate the improvement and quality of care in health. Connected Health Cities (CHC) a pilot cross sector learning health systems programme that focuses on improvement of care was the first of its kind that embedded research into clinical workflows. As such, workforce Development and building skills capacity is a component of the Connected Health Cities programme, but has been addressed on an iterative basis as the programme has progressed and practice has been developed.
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This paper outlines the results of a qualitative study that was undertaken over a six month period to learn from the project journeys and identify learning and training needs that could be translated to others conducting projects in a similar manner. We have constructed a short training programme that highlights the key skills required to run a ‘Learning Health System’ in the future.
This work was carried out in three stages:
- Review of digital adoption methods
- Identification of key training needs through conducting 25 interviews across eight case-studies
- Design of a 10 step short workshop programme.
Seven key areas were identified as being the most important for a successful learning health system project to be implemented:
- Information Governance and ethics
- The data landscape and how to access it
- Curating a data set for subsequent analysis
- Key data analysis steps and interpretation
- Evaluation of technology/methodological introduction
- Communication for diffusion and dissemination of digital innovations
- Understanding how to implement change.
These have been translated into a 10-day programme training programme to improve care pathways using a learning health systems approach.