Sheffield University has recently introduced a new Health Informatics Masters degree by distance learning. This paper documents the initial experiences of setting up, managing and delivering this course. The three parts of the paper cover motivation and background, design and content, and the issues, observations and problems relating to the course respectively. The latter relate to the logistics of delivery and how best to utilize the features of WebCT, and also how to meet the aspirations of students from a wide range of backgrounds.

Information and communications technology is becoming ubiquitous in our everyday lives. This does not however mean that we all inherently know how to use it, or have the skills and knowledge to use it to best effect. This is especially true in nursing where nurses not only need to be able to use it to support their own practice, but also need to be able to help their patients make best use of it. This paper argues that nurses are not currently adequately prepared to work with information and technology through their pre-registration education.Reflecting a lack of nursing informatics expertise it is recommended that all pre-registration nursing programmes should have access to a nursing informatics specialist.A prescription to meet the informatics needs of the newly qualified nurse is proposed. This places the areas that need to be included in pre-registration education into broad groups that both articulate the expertise that nurses need to develop, and indicates why they are needed, rather than providing a context free check lists of skills. This is presented as a binary scatter chart with two axes, skill to knowledge and technology to information.

This article is the first in a series that explores the growth in the use of, and reliance on, information management systems in health and social care. Its aim is to help nurses understand how effective information management systems can improve their practice. Problems faced by nurses in the past, when they have been required to use these systems to record, store and retrieve information, tended to be generated by poor or inappropriate systems. The series offers examples of how the vital role that nurses play in increasingly information-intensive healthcare environments can be developed. This first article sets the scene and considers the health and social care information agenda in light of the Department of Health (2012) information strategy.

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To realise the benefits of digital health, the health workforce needs to evolve, adapt and develop their digital proficiency. As the largest workforce in health, nurses and midwives are well positioned to lead as an agile digital healthcare workforce. The objective of this work is to describe how individual nurses and midwives, organisations and education providers could use the newly developed National Nursing and Midwifery Digital Health Capability Framework to build digital health capability. The paper concludes with an international perspective on the framework.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, some mental healthcare in the United Kingdom has moved online, with more likely to follow. The current evidence base for video consultations is modest; hence, this study seeks to aid decision-makers by reporting on one large National Health Service mental health trust's video-consultation pilot project. Patients' choices/preferences were gathered via online forms; and staff's views, through a focus group. The typical patient was female, 26 years old, living in a deprived locality. Consultations typically lasted 37 minutes, saving patients 0–30 minutes of travel and £0–£3.00. Satisfaction was high, and the software was intuitive. Audio quality varied, but patients felt able to disclose “as if in person,” were willing to use video consultation again, and found them more preferable than home visits and clinic attendance. Staff could foresee benefits but were concerned for their therapeutic relationships and were avoidant without familiarization, training, clinical coaching, and managerial reassurances especially regarding high-risk patients/situations. They argued video consultation would not suit all patients and should be used according to individual need. We found COVID-19 is necessitating staff to adopt video consultation and that patients are satisfied. However, unless staff's concerns are resolved, enabling them to use their full repertoire of interpersonal skills, therapeutic relationships will trump efficiency and video consultations may not remain their treatment modality of choice.

Internationally healthcare organisations and governments are grappling with the issue of upskilling healthcare workforces in relation to digital health. Significant research has been undertaken in relation to documenting essential digital health capability requirements for the workforce. In 2019 the Australian Digital Health Agency funded work by the Australasian Institute of Digital Health to develop a National Nursing and Midwifery Digital Health Capability Framework. This paper describes the methodological approach used in the development of the Framework.