Is anyone in the UK willing to share their experience of being a student of the NHS Digital Academy with New Zealand?
We have a real opportunity to set up our own Academy, modelled on the NHS Digital Academy; although we are much smaller than the UK, our systems are similar and our need for a well trained digital clinical and leadership workforce is just as acute.
The wonderful @rachel_dunscombe is helping us in this journey; we’d really like to supplement our understanding by hearing from those who have been through it, continuing on with their masters, or embarking on it in the second intake.
All of the NZers who are driving this are members of the DHN, and will see any replies to this post. If anyone is willing, you could become an honorary Kiwi for a while and converse more deeply about it on our #nz-forum:nz-academy-forum with us or converse with our @nz-academy-group more privately - just let me know if you’d like to.
Some specifics I would like to hear about include:
Workload. How many hours a week did you spend on your studies and how many were you expected to spend?
Timeline. Did you do a whole Postgraduate Diploma in one year (equivalent to full time study) or over more than one year (part time)? How did this compete with your day job?
Interaction. Was most of the learning online and how did in-person sessions complement what you learned? What was the form of the in-person sessions and were there recorded back-ups for those who couldn’t attend in person?
I have heaps more questions but these three are top of my list
J
Thanks for the explanation, Claudia. Sounds like a nice mix of workplace learning and academic learning. I’d be interested to hear
how students perceive the mix. In my experience, when I plan a course that should have 150 hours of learning and teaching time over a semester, students perceive it as a lot less time.
Those of you who have done this programme, how does the experience-learning workload work for you?
Thanks Brian. Interesting point about mismatch between markers and candidates. It’s something I struggle with all the time as an academic
and health informatics teacher – the balance between the need for theoretical learning and ability to apply it in the work situation and how to pitch the marking to reflect the application.
Thanks Doug. Commitment can be quite personal. When I design a course I know how many hours we should recommend students to devote
to their studies. Some do the minimum and others commit much more, and then there’s my own bias on how much to recommend, e.g. I think a student should spend about an hour reading a recommended article but sometimes the article requires more from the student
because they’re not used to reading that kind of writing. Pitching the workload right is a balancing act, not so?
One area of debate we are having here in NZ is what level academically to pitch our academy program at.
For those of you who have done the NHS program would it have been more or less attractive If instead of being a PGDiploma with 10-15 hours per week of study alongside a busy full time health role it had been a PGCertificate requiring 7-10 hours per week, but retaining the same residential and group work?
Great to hear all of your fantastic insights into the Digital Health Academy, something I’ve been very excited about since speaking with @rachel_dunscombe a number of years ago at the HIC Conference in Australia.
Thanks @NathanK for kicking off this thread, I’m happy to act as an honorary Kiwi along with anyone else willing to contribute to the discussion.
I have a great interest in this topic as I’m also involved with the CHIA Exam committee and the Clinical Informatics steering committee in Australia, and am working with a team of people looking at establishing the CHIA in NZ. While the CHIA is currently a certification based on an online exam with ongoing certification requirements, I would imagine a digital health academy could be complementary. A similar concept is in development in Australia and is being led by a friend of mine, David Rowlands, who’s currently responsible for the Digital Health Workforce initiative which is currently a branch of HISA.
Specifically to the NHS Digital Academy, I have some questions:
How does the application approval process work and who manages this? NHS or ICL?
What is the governance structure of the Academy, and how does the partnership work between NHS and ICL? Are other tertiary institutions looking to get involved as the program expands?
The current entry criteria requires you to:
“be a CIO, CCIO or aspiring digital leader in the NHS”
who establishes who is an appropriate level of aspiring digital leader?
can successful candidates work for an industry provider (ie. third party hardware/software company) who has business with the NHS?
“have 3-5 years of relevant experience in informatics or digital health”
are there details on this criteria regarding whether this is practical and/or academic?
who determines what experience meets the criteria?
“have executive level support from your organisation”
do they have to work for an recognised organisation?
can they be independent contractors who work for the NHS?
can executives themselves participate? or will there be an equivalent course for executives?
What are the practical/applied components to the coursework? Are these standardised?
How are assessments marked? Is this based on something standardised like Blooms Taxonomy? If so, who determines the level of competency for assessments?
Are there ongoing competency requirements following successful completion of the course?
Are any of the clinical colleges looking to accept this qualification as acceptable CPD points for accreditation requirements?
Hello Michael and welcome to the discussion. In response to some of your questions about the Digital Academy.
Q. What do you get when you’ve completed the learning programme?
A. It’s set up as Master of Science from ICL and Edinburgh University. You can exit with a PG Diploma in Digital Leadership.
Q. Assessment design and marking.
A. Assessments are designed and graded by the module directors using the pedagogies that best suit their topic and the students they are teaching. Usually grading rubrics and guidelines are developed as part of this.
Q. How does this programme fit in relation to CHIA?
A. CHIA is not a university programme, and the Digital Academy programme is. CHIA certifies that you know enough to practice as a health informatician, while the PG Dip/Master of Digital Leadership is an executive programme to enhance the reach and effect of those already in or aspiring to occupy leadership positions.
Q. Governance. Since the Digital Academy produces a university qualification, the programme had to be approved by a committee representing all the universities in the UK. The same would apply if it is set up in NZ ( a committee representing all universities in NZ will need to see and approve the plan). This committee monitors the programme (indeed, all university programmes) on a high level. Within the universities providing the programme there are several levels of governance, e.g. at university level there is an education governance committee and in the schools/departments that provide the actual teaching there are boards of studies. The programme is subject to several regular external and internal reviews, e.g. graduating year review, five-yearly external reviews.
Q. Accreditation by the health informatics community, e.g. something like ACHI or Faculty of Clinical Informatics. A. It’s not common for university programmes to be accredited but it does happen. ACHI is currently designing a system for accrediting university programmes. Watch this space.
Q. Entry requirements to do the Master of Digital Leadership via the Digital Academy.
A. Same as for any postgraduate programme (including recognition of prior experience and degrees). Additional requirements, e.g. work experience in the field, are assessed by the enrollment team under guidance from those running the programme. I would like to know some of the details here too.
Q. The Digital Academy learning programme and CPD.
A. This is a university qualification so it’s not considered to be CPD. You would be expected by your affiliation to, e.g. ACHI, to keep your CPD up to date. The Digital Academy develops the network of participants (aka students) so that they can keep one another up to date over time and after completion of the programme.
Q. What kinds of people are targeted for the Digital Academy?
A. Senior executives in the first instance, followed by ‘aspiring digital leaders’. Not clear yet what the latter is, who they work for, and if independent consultants qualify.
My question: What makes the Digital Academy different from other universities and their programmes? A possible answer: It looks like they have found a way to capture the imaginations of executives and make them excited about building a community of confident leaders who have a common understanding of their vision to transform the health sector. The Digital Academy is a form of leadership. Our challenge in NZ is to do something similar here.
I appreciate your responses however these don’t really answer my questions. I was more directing my questions to the people who were involved in establishing and running the NHS Digital Academy rather than how it could work in NZ.
I think the NZ ‘digital academy’ concept requires more discussion with a broader representative audience to discuss what would result in the best value for the whole healthcare and disability system, not just tertiary institutions alone. It could be a partnership between academic institutions and other representation. I’m thinking the wider health sector (universities, clinical colleges, industry partners, DHBs, PHOs, NGOs, NFPs, MoH…) as well as its interfaces with other sectors (justice, education, social services, housing, transport, employement etc). However, we also don’t want too many opinions and not get anywhere. I’m interested in other peoples insights/opinions here.
I believe we need to consider a system-thinking approach to this digital academy concept so we can continue to collaborate toward integrating our broader system to becoming more effective. I’m thinking that if university committees are the only institutions establishing/approving the program, it may lack credibility than if there were broader governance representation from these other organisations/sectors mentioned above. What do others think?
Adding to @james_reed’s comment, I think this is a good lesson to learn from. We should focus on doing AND reflecting.
While I am NZ based our DHB is looking into this so I am really keen to be a part of the discussion and work going forward. Keen to keep in the loop and help where I can.
Kind regards
Its interesting reading all the comments posted here. What occurs to me is that much of what is discussed about a Digital Academy is heavily focused on our current leaders. I would be interested in looking at how we develop the leaders of tomorrow, from all healthcare disciplines. The same difficulties in access to University based courses affects those who would like to develop their careers into this exciting and progressive area. Access to funding and the ability to complete a course of study would be a barrier for many as it is currently. For adult learners, the importance is in learning skills that are directly applicable to their current or developing work, “Learn today, use tomorrow” may be attractive to healthcare professionals who have already undertaken considerable tertiary education already to get where they are now. What I am reading from many of the posts from the NHS experience is that the practical application was the most valuable. If things like CHIA accreditation do not require a formal qualification do we need to make this a university course?
Hi Karen, I’m based in the CDHB. We’ve taken a local approach to split out three core streams of work in the area I work in: Data; Digital and Improvements/ project skills/ Change skills.
We’ve targeted this ‘pick and mix’ approach at various groups of front line staff, and built it around ways to support staff to get ‘quick learnings’ on a tiered module approach. The learning is online + a networking group to join for support + some networking days. This has been hard to put together and evolved over the last year or so. (It has the local leadership backing and an upskilling program for the leaders, but their is at a less accelerated level, so we can let the clinical staff get access to what they need to support problem solving and service improvements off the ground where they work, which in turn seems to help keep everyone motivated as they see results quickly.)
We’ve taken the approach to split them up for a variety of reasons, but its helping us to craft local pathways for upskilling route for growing our ‘shiny stars’ into leadership ready roles.
We haven’t yet tackled in great depth how this will work against development planning for role progression (and watching the CiLN discussions with interest to see where MOH and Universities land with this direction) - but because our P&C team have recently revised our processes for success and development we’ve been offering letters of commendation to staff completing different modules or pieces of work as a way to give recognition for their time.
How we know this is making a difference - is harder to measure, a few of us are working through some metrics at the moment be happy to share at CiLN meeting in Nov in Hamilton.
It still feels early days and very grass roots, but happy to share the learnings (good or challenging) from the journey. Our leadership team has taken it as a Digital academy style approach, but development remains very fluid to fit the needs of the local context.
Thanks @rowena or your offer on presenting on this at the networking event in November, I’ve now added you to the agenda with a slot of around 5mins and a couple of mins for questions if that suits? We will then have a break-out session focused on workforce development and different approaches being taken around the country.
