NHS digital workforce plan is too late for ICB staff facing the axe

The NHS digital workforce plan may arrive too late to prevent the loss of critical skills across England’s integrated care boards (ICBs), NHS digital leaders have warned.

Speaking at Digital Health’s webinar on ‘Digital workforce needed to deliver the 10 year plan‘ on 5 December 2025, Martin Dennys, deputy director programme delivery at NHS England, said that the inclusion of digital roles in the 10 year workforce plan, to be published in spring 2026, marked a significant shift.

He confirmed that modelling work had led to “expectations of a fair amount of growth needed to support the 10 year workforce plan” and acknowledged that the “significant move into digital” would require “an amount of digital skills to do that even with productivity tools”.

Dennys said that digital capability must extend across the entire health service and not be limited to the “less than 3% of us that do digital within the NHS”.

“Actually the other 97% of the workforce also need to be able to use digital confidently and competently,” he said. 

However, panellists warned that the 10 year workforce plan could be too late for the large numbers of ICB digital staff whose jobs are being placed at risk through restructuring. 

Amy Freeman, chief digital information officer (CDIO) at University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust and chair of the Digital Health Networks Clinical Information Officer Advisory Panel, said: “I think we are heading to potentially haemorrhaging a significant number of people in the digital space and finding ourselves without the necessary resources.”

She added that after making people redundant there was a danger of  “spending a small fortune with KPMG and Deloitte on buying those services and skills back”.

Freeman also highlighted the “patchy” level of digital skills across the NHS, pointing to inconsistent clinical informatics roles and uneven access to training. 

While multiple regional and national training offers exist, she said that “there is too much choice and then it becomes difficult to know what the right choice is”. 

“I think this is where tying it into job descriptions would be helpful because if we were saying that to do this job, these are the professional skills you should have and these are the training courses that will help you gain those professional skills – then all of a sudden you can map out your career.”

Shaukat Ali Khan, executive CDIO at NHS West Yorkshire ICB, highlighted growing pressures on local teams. 

He said that organisations are “struggling with regards to the growing expectations on digital, data and technology and at the same time with the resources which will be available after all this restructuring”. 

Nick O’Reilly, former digital director at Birmingham and Solihull ICB, said that a unified competency and career framework should focus on widening access to digital roles. 

“We need to be better at thinking about how we open up our profession to people who have the skills but may not have a perceived set of academic qualifications that are important,” he said.

You can watch the webinar on demand here.