Seeking research collaborators
I am looking for collaborators to help me form a research team to design a biographical study with a Kaupapa Maaori lens, apply for funding, and build a decision support system to help people design and evaluate their careers as digital health specialists.
If you want to know more or would like to collaborate with me, please message me or call me on 0278201125.
More information…
This research aims to address difficulties associated with planning and navigating a digital health specialisation career, by creating an interactive computerised decision support system. Health care is being transformed via information technologies to increasingly decentralise care from hospitals to homes and communities.
The digital health workforce is core to transformational success. Identifying digital health specialists, leveraging their capabilities and expertise, and building them into the health workforce systematically is imperative to successful reform. Radical health sector reform in New Zealand started on 1 July 2022, of which digital transformation is a major component.
Without a clear career path, the digital health workforce is invisible, and the potential for transformation cannot be accessed to redesign the health workforce and improve the overall health of our society. This invisibility makes it hard to write job descriptions, recruit appropriately competent workers, and design careers.
Unlike nursing and medicine, there is no easily recognisable professional profile, or regulatory organisation, to define or describe their work or impact on the health system. Entry into the career can be from clinical, engineering, computer science and business backgrounds. Depending on their entry point, they follow different, and often unplanned, career trajectories leading to uncertain and unpredictable outcomes.
Digital health work has been investigated using vignettes to describe workers[9], outlining key elements of the work they do, providing career matrices, publishing lists and descriptions of competencies, designing a strategic roadmap for education, analysing observations of the workers at work, conducting a census of New Zealand and Australian digital health workers, and outlining certification of digital health workers.
What is missing is how people actually start a digital health specialisation career, what they do as they progress through their careers, and how competencies support their progress.
The proposed approach for this research is to use participatory action research that hinges on biographies of those already in digital health specialist roles to use stories of lived experience to create the decision support system. They have the potential to make future careers visible because new entrants will use the biographical narrative of those who have gone before them.
A biographical approach is the best way to access actual career trajectories and experiences because narrative gives the researcher (and researched) access to thick descriptions. These rich, deep, contextualised and nuanced data, once analysed and presented in a decision support system, can for the first time support career planning and progression for digital health specialists, offering a realistic and useful way to design a career path. The narratives that examine challenges and how they were overcome can be represented in a ‘what if I do it like this’ form of exploring career options in a decision support system.
Looking forward to hearing from you
Karen Day, Senior Lecturer (digital health), University of Auckland
