There is an impetus on healthcare organisations to become more data driven, to treat digital informatics as a strategic asset, to put in place processes and systems that allow them to access and analyse the right data to support clinical decision-making, and inform the use of resources where it is needed most. The fast pace of development in technologies such as genomics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, digitalisation and data analytics, bionanotechnology and robotics means digital informatics will form an essential part of the future NHS.
As a profession, we need to consider how we will move from holding a raft of data to embedding this in our culture. The vision is to make digital informatics a fundamental component of the pharmacy professional’s career framework. With increased digitalisation, embracing these concepts early on will help embed the use of data in everyday practice and improve medicines optimisation — providing the right choice of medicines, at the right time to the patient, informing shared decision-making. But do we have truly aligned measurement and monitoring of medicines optimisation that all the profession are fluent with?
The chief pharmaceutical officer’s clinical fellows are leading a project aimed at involving early careers pharmacy professionals in the use of data to improve patient care. One of the first steps in the project is understanding the attitudes and perceptions of early-career pharmacy professionals in using data and to gather their views on what is required.
We are requesting all early-career pharmacy professionals (including undergraduates, preregistration trainees and all pharmacy professionals with ten or fewer years’ experience post-qualification) to give us their views through a survey. Although we are interested in the views of the overall workforce, the initial focus is on early-career pharmacy professionals. We are looking for views from pharmacy professionals across all sectors.
Complete the survey at: https://healtheducationyh.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/use-of-data-by-ecps
The survey takes approximately 5–10 minutes to complete, and will remain open until 16 May 2018.
Khola Khan, CPhO clinical fellow, NHS Improvement
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