Pilot focuses on IT skills in NHS

Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust is working with skills groups on a pilot project to support the Welsh Assembly government's latest policies for information in healthcare.

The Informing Healthcare strategy is due to be launched early next month. One of its key themes is workforce development and it will also need significant technical skills to implement it.

Gwent is testing the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), developed by industry training body eSkills UK, to establish whether it could be of use to IT managers across NHS Wales.

'We want to see whether the framework maps onto a real IT department and has validity,' said John Hallam, head of records strategy at Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust.

'We want to see whether it will be of use for local IT managers in the NHS in Wales as a way of putting together a more focused personal development plan for staff using well-defined competencies,' he said.

More than 50 of Gwent's technical staff are taking part in the project. It will report back in the Spring and is being run in partnership with eSkills UK, the Centre for Health Leadership Wales and the Welsh Assembly government.

The SFIA covers a range of competencies including strategic planning, database administration and project management. It was developed to help standardise job descriptions and content to give a clearer view about what skills staff need.

'For each member of staff we are going through the framework to establish what the expected competencies are, then that person will map their current skills onto that and we will look at the difference,' said Hallam.

Subject to the pilot's conclusions, the model could be adopted for technical staff across NHS Wales, he says.

Unlike more traditional approaches to technology skills, the SFIA is not application specific.

'SFIA looks as at management competencies as well, which is often a weaker area,' said Hallam.