It should be mandatory for health organisations to involve clinicians in the digital transformation agendas in their workplaces, a nurse leader has urged MPs.
Karen Payne, head of nursing and quality at NHS Dorset and a Topol Digital Fellow, gave evidence today to a new Health and Social Care Committee inquiry looking at NHS digital transformation.
Ms Payne told the committee of cross-party MPs how, when organisations attempted to roll out a digital change without involving clinicians, projects tended to fail.
“We’re not very good at engaging clinicians where they are, and that’s what we need to do”
Karen Payne
She said the national picture in terms of clinician involvement in digital was currently “really inconsistent” and she wanted to see new rules placed on organisations to change that.
“I think we’ve got some areas of really good practice where you have clinicians in at the start, they come up with the problem that needs solving, and they’re exploring with their digital teams solutions that might be able to be found, or suggesting ways that someone else is doing it that we could adopt.
“In other areas, there are times when digital teams are coming up with solutions on their own without speaking to the clinicians, and that’s generally when they fail.”
She warned that there was a “big hole” in the presence and scope of clinical digital teams in organisations.
While some employers had strong clinical digital teams, others had none at all or small teams who only had time for clinical digital safety work and not “bigger picture” transformation, Ms Payne said.
It was her view that digital clinical teams were currently “hugely undervalued”.
Asked by the committee about solutions, Ms Payne said: “I think digital clinical teams should be mandated in some form for organisations, to make sure that clinicians are there at the start of every project to understand how that might work.”
She highlighted the key role digital clinical teams played in liaising with frontline staff about what is important to them and helping to teach them how to use newly implemented technologies.
“Quite often technology is implemented and the nurses on the wards, the [nursing associates], the actual on-the-ground staff are often too busy to attend the training,” added Ms Payne, who is a health visitor by background.
“Clinical staff are also really bad at looking at emails. So, you might send them an email that says, ‘here’s an online video that you can watch on how to use it’.
“I remember when I was working clinically, if I checked my emails once a week, it was a good week, whereas in my current job, I wouldn’t manage without it.
“We’re not very good at engaging clinicians where they are, and that’s what we need to do.”