Insights on National Digital Health Strategy from CAPHIA 2020 forum

[0:00]Hey everyone. I'm Angela Ryan from the Australian Digital Health Agency. I'm the agency's chief clinical information officer and also the general manager of workforce and education. I am speaking to you today from Gadigal country and I'd like to acknowledge uh the Gadigal people of the Nation. and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging and also extend that acknowledgement uh to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who may be listening to this presentation today. Australia's National Digital Health strategy, safe, seamless and secure was co-designed with all of our states and territories and agreed by the COAG Health Council. It contains seven strategic priorities, each of these identified throughout the consultation. What we're going to focus on today is the sixth pillar, workforce and education, and that's about the workforce confidently using digital health technologies to deliver health and care. But we wanted to touch briefly just on a couple of other programs that we've been involved with. Uh some of those other pieces of work have been around growing the uh curriculum, uh in particular nursing and midwifery curriculum. Uh but we're also doing some work now with the Australian Medical Council uh to build up the medical curriculum. We've also been running a number of other programs in regard to emergency departments and have been leading on a fairly large piece of work over the last couple of years with the Australian Commission on safety and quality and health care to try and really grow the capability of our emergency department clinicians. Developing the road map, it's really about acknowledging that need to develop a national strategy to address the capability requirements of not just our existing but also our emerging workforce. So there are a number of components in the development of this roadmap. It started with a literature review, but then we really got people together. We managed to have a number of different workshops in each state and territory, we worked with consumers, we worked with patients. We then ran a series of surveys and this culminated in a national summit that was held in Sydney back in November last year. That was a wonderful opportunity for all of those people who'd been involved in the consultation to come together and finalize the strategy. The road map consists of a high-level framework that describes the changes required to maximize the use of digital health. So there's a three horizon framework and this really reflects the maturity of the health workforce. Each horizon has its own vision. Horizon one is really about bringing everyone up to the same consistent digital literacy level. Horizon two is thinking about integration of new technologies and new ways of working. And then finally horizon 3 is really about that transformation piece. It's bringing all of those elements together at scale. Underneath each horizon sits the education priorities. Horizon one, as I said, is really around digital literacy, and that's really the priority to enable that secure and ethical management of our data. Horizon two is new emerging roles and horizon 3 is about new models of care. The road map identifies eight different profiles. Importantly, the road map is designed to be broad in its application. As we know, members of the health workforce come from a variety of roles. These roles are classified as digital profiles in the road map. They've really been designed to look right across the health sector and represent all of those different functions that each of us plays. So you may not just fit inside one as a clinician, but you might also have additional functions. So you might be involved in education and research, you might actually be involved in um technology bridging. So really it's been designed not necessarily just to reflect a profession, but what your function may be. The focus of this presentation is on the education and research profile. The roles and responsibilities affiliated with the research and education profile are. The digital adopter and lifelong learner, the digital teacher, the digital change champion, the ethics and privacy advocate, the information analyzer, and the health reformer. We've talked about profiles and we've talked about horizons. This is where they come together as educational interventions. So the educational interventions associated with Horizon one, focusing around early adoption and thinking about curiosity. So we're thinking about the bigger picture, but we're also building digital literacy. In Horizon 2, we see a focus on emerging roles and curricula. Horizon 3 is a cumulative effect, bringing all of these components together. So if you want to contribute and be part of the solution, the details are on the screen now. Thanks for your time.