Skills & The Future Workforce
We operate at the intersection of innovation and education while practicing change management to support the digital transformation of the Scottish health and care sector and its workforce capability needs.
Defining the digital health and care workforce
When discussing skills and future workforce development, we focus on two broad categories of staff - the specialist digital health and care workforce and the health and social care workforce using digital solutions.
The digital health and care workforce
When discussing skills and future workforce development, we focus on two broad categories of staff:
1. Specialist digital health and care workforce
Staff who design, develop, deliver and facilitate the implementation of digital solutions to support health and social care including:
- specialist knowledge, information and data professionals
- clinical/ social care informaticians
- quality assurance and evaluation, and cyber-security personnel working in health and care
2. The health and social care workforce using digital solutions
- Health and social care staff, who use digital solutions in the day-to-day delivery of formal health and care services, or in supporting or managing the delivery
- This encompasses the entire workforce including clinical, social care, public health, management and support roles
- All these groups need to be able to use digital solutions to carry out their roles effectively in the digital age
The impact of digital transformation
The digital transformation of health and care has a huge impact on the current workforce, their skills and capability requirements. The lack of a suitably skilled workforce is the single biggest factor impacting the economic growth of the digital health and care sector.
We support the growth of the Scottish digital health and care sector, and the digital transformation of the broader health and care sector, to ensure a continuous pipeline of skilled employees, by helping our partners to understand:
Current and emerging skills and capability requirements
Educational opportunities in the sector
Discover a career in digital health and care
Digital health and care is a fairly new domain, and it is among the fastest-growing economic sectors in the world. The single most significant factor in restricting that growth both globally and in Scotland is the lack of suitably skilled employees feeding into it.
Discovering your digital potential
The DHI has worked in partnership with Skills Development Scotland and the Digital World to carry out a series of projects to define and better understand Scotland's digital health and care sector.
Through research into the skills and capability requirements of the sector, we discovered that there is a general lack of awareness of digital health and care as a career option.
To create a pipeline of talent for the sector, we need to address the issue beginning at a school level. This means educating not only teachers and parents but crucially school children and young people, who are at the critical stage of selecting subjects that will determine the path they can take after school.
Find out more about careers in digital health and care through Skills Development Scotland, see: www.digitalworld.net
To find out more about research into skills and capabilities in digital health and care, see our reports:
Research & Knowledge Exchange
We deliver in-house research, which influences strategy and policy change.
Our research outputs include policy reviews, current state mappings, summary documents, fact sheets, market research reports, consultation studies and more extensive research reports.
We share our research findings with a wide range of stakeholders and seek to improve our understanding of digital health and care skills and capability issues by engaging with the wider sector.
