Digital leaders urge workforce support for the 10 year health plan

Senior digital leaders in NHS trusts have hailed the 10 year health plan for putting digital and data “front and centre” of the government’s drive to transform the health service, but warned that a huge piece of work on delivery is required to fill in the missing detail, unpick “contradictions” and support the digital workforce.

Following a briefing call with Vin Diwakar, national director of transformation at NHS England and Ming Tang, chief digital and information officer at NHSE, on 14 July 2025, members of Digital Health Networks Advisory Panels met to reveal their initial reactions to the plan and discuss what needs to happen next.

The webinar panel included Hayley Grafton, chair of the Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO) Advisory Panel and a member of the ‘People’ workstream which contributed to the plan.

Webinar chair Jon Hoeksma, chief executive at Future Health Intelligence, asked Grafton how much of the ‘People’ group’s work made it into the published plan.

“Reassuringly, a lot of it did,” she said, but added that the details of the recommendations were “missing” and suggested these may have “shifted into the upcoming workforce plan.”

Grafton said that she had sometimes felt like a “lone voice” in emphasising the need to upskill staff to take on technology. One of her key recommendations was around equipping NHS leaders to “move at the pace” of the plan’s digital ambitions.

“Some of it, I found a little contradictory. We’re saying [in the plan] that we need to upskill everyone and yet the places on the NHS Digital Academy have been cut by nearly half this year.

“There’s something amiss in how we’re preparing our people. I’m hoping there’s [going to be] a big follow-up.”

Grafton welcomed how the plan had made digital “front and centre” of the government’s three big shifts for the NHS (hospital to community, analogue to digital, sickness to prevention),

“It’s the golden thread through each of the shifts.

“But for me the real standout was how people-centric the plan is. Giving power to patients and bringing the patient experience back to the centre of all we do, I found really encouraging.”

Grafton’s enthusiasm for the plan and concerns about the workforce were shared by the panel.

Ben Jeeves, chair of the Networks’ Chief Safety Officer (CSO) Council, said the plan was “empowering” and “invigorating” for digital leaders but warned that delivery could be put at risk by the huge challenges facing the NHS and workforce pressures.

“I’m aware of so many digital teams having to actually reduce their headcount, which is slowing down transformation,” he said.

He stressed that a “whole package” of training and workforce support needed to be wrapped around “hugely transformational” technologies like ambient AI to release the benefits.

Jeeves called for workforce pressures to be addressed “very quickly, saying that we need  “a dose of reality”.

“We’ve got to look at where we are and how we get to a much stronger place, hopefully as quickly as possible,” he added.

The panel’s concern about workforce pressures was also reflected in comments from the webinar’s audience, with one contributor saying the workforce’s digital literacy would have to be “massively improved”. There were reports that many organisations are facing significant job cuts, including in digital teams.

Other prominent concerns from the chat related to projects being cut or wound up and dysfunctional financial flows.

Hugely complex and challenging

James Hawkins said a “whole system” shift was required to make technology an enabler of care and part of the NHS’s core mission, adding that without that “we will not have the funding or the alignment to be able to deliver the plan”.

The vice chair of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Advisory Panel highlighted “a few contradictions” in the plan.

“There’s a commitment around enabling data to be used for research but there’s also commitment around genomics data to be held by the patient and not shared without explicit consent. The two don’t always align in my mind.

“There needs to be a step back [to] look at the overall plan and think about how it should be managed and what needs to come first.

“This plan is hugely complex, it’s going to be hugely political and really challenging to deliver everything that’s outlined,” he said.

John Mitchell, chair of the Integrated Care System (ICS) Digital Council, said the most exciting thing in the plan was the repeated use of the word “my” and the emphasis on patient power. “At the moment we’re in a place where even if you are digitally mature or digitally literate as a patient, there are too many times when the computer says ‘no’.”

However, the panel agreed that great care would have to be taken to avoid exacerbating digital inequalities and exclusion. “What we don’t want to do is move forward faster than our population can,” said Penny Kechagioglou, chair of the Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) Advisory Panel.

She highlighted the need to involve people in the plan’s recommendations around neighbourhood health and the single patient record.

“How do we bring the patient voice in as well as the clinical voice to co-design those solutions moving forward?” she asked.

The ambition to put “a virtual doctor” in patient’s pockets was “really good, really strong” said Mitchell, adding that “we just need to make sure we don’t leave anybody behind, either the public or our staff”.

Smash the silos

Mitchell also emphasised the need to balance the drive for efficiency at scale with local flexibility. “There has to be some ability for local subject matter experts to tailor the national solutions, the national offerings [and] be able to say ‘actually, we’ve got a specific need here and we need to find something unique to us which will plug this gap’.”

The panel noted that many of the plan’s ideas were not new – much of its impact would be in energising local leaders and “dialling up” the innovative work already underway at local level. Partnership working, including with industry, will be key.

“The biggest block to us going forward is the sheer number of silos across the organisations we work for,” said Mitchell.

“In order to deliver the level of ambition that’s outlined across the next 10 years we have to consider ourselves part of the same organisation, all pulling in the same direction.

“If we come together and support each other, and fill the gaps proactively rather than reactively, then we’ve got a good chance of being able to make some really good changes.”

Hawkins called for a “high level picture” of how everything in the plan will fit together. “How should the funding flow? What’s going to be the best incentives to deliver the plan? I would think long and hard about that.”

He added that releasing early funding to support “experiment and focus” on “key outcomes” would “build momentum and confidence”.

Jeeves captured the mood of the panel – a mix of clear-eyed realism and ‘can do’ excitement – when he called for digital leaders to embrace the challenge of delivering the plan.

“It’s huge, isn’t it? It’s complex by its very nature. I think it is about thinking big. Transformation should exactly be that. It’s about starting with the end in mind and things should look very different to when we started.

“It’s around people, it’s around workforce, it’s training, it’s governance, it’s the entire thing.

“But if you get the right people in the room, strip it all out, have that clarity, I think this absolutely can be achieved.”

The webinar panel:

• Hayley Grafton, chair, CNIO Advisory Panel
• James Hawkins, vice chair, CIO Advisory Panel
• Penny Kechagioglou, chair, CCIO Advisory Panel
• John Mitchell, ICS Digital Council
• Ben Jeeves, chair, CSO Council
• Jon Hoeksma, chief executive at Future Health Intelligence