Thriving in the Digital Age
By Councillor Paul Kelly
COSLA’s Health & Social Care Spokesperson
Health, Social Work and social care services are facing unrelenting pressures. We’re delivering services in an extremely challenging financial climate; we have an aging demographic, and we have significant recruitment and retention issues across the sector. This isn’t something new, it’s something that has been happening for several years. In 2011 the Christie Report highlighted that our public services needed urgent and sustained reform to meet the unprecedented challenges and made several recommendations. Unfortunately, the impact of the Covid pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis has made things much more difficult both for people accessing and delivering services. So, we’ve known for some time that we can’t continue to deliver services in the same way.
Since becoming COSLA spokesperson I have had an increased understanding of the importance of digital and data for transforming health, social work and social care services. COSLA and the Scottish Government jointly published the refreshed digital health and care strategy in 2021, aptly titled Care in the Digital Age. We are delivering health, social work and social care services in a digital age and people expect to be able to use digital tools to access the services we provide.
One of the key deliverables from this strategy was building digital skills and leadership, so that our workforce feels confident and competent with using digital tools and data. The Digitally Enabled Workforce (DEW Team) within NHS National Education for Scotland (NES) were commissioned by COSLA and the Scottish Government to develop national resources and learning networks that support digital skills and digital leadership development across the health, social work and social care sector.
The DEW Team have been working with stakeholders from across the sector to develop a range of resources to support our workforce. I wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness of some of the resources they have developed recently and how people can access them. They are free to anyone working in health, social work or social care to access.
In July, Digital and Data Capability Framework was launched. The framework identifies the digital skills, knowledge, and behaviours the workforce needs to do their job and deliver safe and good quality care and support.
The Thriving in a Digital Age Pathways was launched at the beginning of October. The Pathways are intended to build understanding of the role of digital in health, social work and social care. There are four pathways; Explore, Embed, Drive and Shape which are aligned to levels of responsibility. Key digital concepts are introduced and developed over the course of the pathway series, with each pathway building on the themes introduced in the pathway before.
What is crucial about the framework and the pathways are that they are not specific to any profession, organisation or role and apply to the entire workforce across the sector (NHS, Local Authorities, Health and Social Care Partnerships, Social Work, Social Care, Care and Support Providers, Housing, Third and Independent Sectors), including managers, leaders, and those in strategic positions. That’s because 80% of digital skills (depending on the skill level required) will be common to all roles with only 20% being role specific. This provides us with a great opportunity to collaborate across organisations and ensure that we use our resources as effectively as possible.
The Digitally Enabled Workforce website provides information on the range of resources that have been developed to date including the Digital Health and Care Leadership Programme, the Professional Development Award in Technology Enabled Care, and elearning modules on how to use digital tools such as Near Me.