The chief clinical information officer of NHS England has addressed a ‘macho culture’ within pockets of NHS IT leadership and the need to diversify the senior workforce.
Speaking on the second day of the Health and Care Innovation Expo in Manchester, Dr Simon Eccles said the NHS was “working very hard” to make NHS leadership roles “more inviting” to women and people from non-white backgrounds.
Eccles made the comments during a session featuring representatives from the NHS Digital Academy and after Fiona McDonald, clinical advisor and digital clinical champion of NHS England, revealed that only 22% of successful applicants to the Academy in 2017 were women.
McDonald also said that she was “shocked” to learn that only 20% of applicants to the Digital Academy were female, characterising it as “a real problem”.
McDonald further offered that digital transformation would not happen in the NHS unless it offered more equal representation across its workforce.
“You can’t have success in any area of work unless you’ve got that multi-disciplinary and diverse element in there,” she said.
“You can’t have interesting conversations if you have the same views and come from the same backgrounds.”
Responding, Eccles said there was a “serious question” regarding how NHS IT could change its culture to make it “more inviting”.
“We have got to fix this,” he said. “We can’t have a conversation with a clinical workforce which is majority women and expect to do that using only the usual IT crowd.
“We’ve had a habit, in some areas of this agenda, of having a rather macho culture.
“We are working very hard to address this and we hope we will succeed.”
The NHS Digital Academy was formally launched earlier this year in an effort to create a new way to build digital leaders in the NHS, and provide an opportunity for clinicians to build expertise in informatics.
Applications for the next cohort of future digital leaders were opened today (6 September).
Rachel Dunscombe, panel chair and head of the Digital Academy, said the programme had been “fast and furiously paced”, although Dr Eccles suggested that encouraging individuals to explore a career in informatics alongside clinical commitments could be “a hard sell”.
“We need to allow the clinical community to have a portfolio career that allows them to spend time in informatics… It’s a hard sell and there are people who are struggling to balance that portfolio.
“We have to change that atmosphere at board level to allow people to pursue that necessary part of the future role of clinicians.”
13 September 2018 @ 11:30
It has become a running joke in our area that only men get management positions, even when more than capable female applicants apply and interview for the same jobs. We now have a host of egotistical peacocks parading their plumage around creating more problems than they are solving as they are more concerned with battling for alpha status, whilst the rest of us try to crack on and fix everything falling from under them.
It didn’t help that they all had the same interview panel.
We all feel frustrated by this but there is nobody to speak to about it, the people we would complain to are the very same as those employing them in the first place.
13 September 2018 @ 13:10
It is a quite general characteristic of the leadership of the NHS, including at Government level, that it is complaint proof by design. This is not confined to the issue of diversity of management. Trying to communicate with them is exactly like communicating with Vladimir Putin, and just as productive.
7 September 2018 @ 12:45
I am appalled by the idea of being in the hands of clinicians who “spend time in informatics”. In my view that is a serious disqualification and I would always avoid such people. Unfortunately one cannot avoid the destruction they wreak at leadership level.
7 September 2018 @ 10:27
The bigger issue is a lack of STRONG leadership talent across all levels of the NHS… and that should also be diverse.
7 September 2018 @ 02:40
20% of successful Digital Academy applicants in 2017 were women, not 2%! Please correct that.
7 September 2018 @ 09:35
Thanks for spotting, Nathan – that’s been corrected.