Sonia Patel: ‘We need a stronger digital workforce pipeline’

The chief technology officer at NHS England has called for a “stronger digital workforce pipeline” to support the delivery of the 10 year health plan.

Speaking at day two of the Health Excellence Through Technology 2025 conference, in London in October, Sonia Patel said that there not been “a clear direction of travel” during her five years working at NHSE.

“What we do need is clarity around actually what we’re going to deliver, how we’re going to deliver it, and actually where we need to call on that partnership to help us deliver it,” Patel said.

She called the development of a model digital blueprint for NHSE, “the most powerful way to support a seismic shift that we’re looking at with the 10 year plan to provide clear signalling from the centre”.

To achieve the shift to digital, Patel said that there is a need to move to person-centred architecture, digital public infrastructure and a shift to the NHS operating model.

“We’ve made great strides in digitisation through EPRs [electronic patient records], through work on data platforms and particularly the work that we’ve done around the NHS App, but it’s held up by fragmented approaches.

“So a unified operating model balances national consistency with local flexibility and so we want to ensure we’re clarifying the roles from national, regional to local to ensure investment aligns with standards,” Patel said.

In conversation with Avi Mehra, associate partner and clinical safety officer at IBM, Patel spoke about the need for a “stronger digital workforce pipeline” to support delivery of the 10 year health plan.

She added that NHSE is “actively working on the 10 year workforce plan” and must “make a serious commitment” in terms of the workforce.

“We’re seeing that one in 10 civil servants will be digital and data professionals, we will need new resources in this space, and it doesn’t mean necessarily digital data.

“What we’re going to see is the emergence of hybrid roles.

“We’re seeing digital roles happening in nature, digital roles happening in finance, digital roles, as we already are experiencing, with clinical informaticians, in medicine and nursing as well, so we need to embrace it.

“We need to support it. We need to encourage it. And we also need to put some education and skilling up behind it,” Patel said.

She also said that NHSE wants “to ensure we’re clarifying roles from national, regional to local to ensure investment aligns with standards”.

“This means clearer accountability, coordinated talent pipelines, and communities of practice that accelerate the adoption and delivery consistent with the digital experiences nationwide,” Patel said.

She highlighted the need to move away from a “transactional relationship” technology suppliers to more of “a partnership around delivering outcomes”.

“I’ve heard loud and clear from industry and the conversations I’ve had with industry, that they want to do more, they absolutely do.

“They don’t want to be seen as just providing the technology, they want to enable the change,” Patel said.