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In her next column for Digital Health News, Natasha Phillips, chief nursing information officer at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, reminisces on the trials and tribulations of the trust’s go-live of Epic in March 2019, and how coming together as a united front ensured it was not only a success, but an unforgettable experience for those involved.

As I sit on the sofa, finally relaxing after organising the family Christmas that has gone by in a flash, and I am reminded of Mila Kunis in the movie Bad Moms Christmas. Yes, not a particularly high-brow lens for a digital blog, but who doesn’t love a Christmas movie?

And as a working mum, this one resonates…so bear with me. In one scene, Mila laments: “Moms make Christmas: there is so much pressure to create the perfect Christmas, the sense of responsibility is overwhelming.” Unlike Mila, I resisted the urge to rebel, to run for the hills and abandon Christmas dinner for takeaway. I stayed in the race when the task seemed overwhelming, when the weight of responsibility, on top of an equally busy full-time job, threatened to drag me down.
Yes, a tad dramatic I know, but with a very happy family I am now recreating myself as the hero of Christmas – move over Santa. So, as I sit here in a post-Christmas daze, wondering how it went so well, my mind naturally starts to draw parallels with my Epic year.

Looking back
This time last year, UCLH were in final preparations for its Epic go-live. There was so much to do: 10,000 staff to be trained, over 3,000 bits of hardware to be rolled out, technical dress rehearsal, the list goes on. It was daunting, but nurses are good at change. We have good structures and processes to adapt and implement. Our community and sub-communities were ready to be mobilised. Rosters were already planned to accommodate the 15 hours of training needed for each nurse; 22.5 hours for each midwife.
As Christmas 2018 drew to a close, we started our new year with renewed vigour for the task ahead. Following the example of our professional history, we organised ourselves along military lines. Weekly matron meetings for planning and familiarisation, cascade of key workflows from here downwards, weekly bulletins, and the development of our practice educators as Epic Experts.
Every nurse, from chief nurse downwards, trained to use Epic across a 24/7 roster for the go-live period, all to ensure we supported each other. We agreed our go-live focus would be not just doing this together, but to cultivate joy at work for each and every member of staff, whatever the challenges.

The big switch-on
31 March arrived and at 6am we switched on, our battle plans in place. We had mobilised: barriers came down and everyone remarked how easy it was to get things done. The often-tiresome bureaucracy that slows things down fell away. Excitement was palpable as last-minute preparations were made. The Chief Nurse and I were on the wards getting those final Rover mobile devices deployed, meanwhile our technical team worked through the night to fix those technical things that were still not right. Just like the pre-Christmas period, there were cries of “we’ll never be ready”.
At 6am on 1 April, with our wards staffed with supernumerary superuser nurses, rostered nurse leaders, as well as clinical and non-clinical UCLH staff both patient-facing and those usually behind the scenes, we turned it on. We had ‘gone live’ and entered our new digital world, together as one, in one moment.
Nine hospitals, 10,000 staff, 3,500 nurses and midwives moved from disparate systems, paper and digital, multiple logins to one system – one patient with one record that we could all see and use together. The battle plans came into action, for nurse leaders starting the day reviewing the safety dashboard to monitor how we were doing and share our intelligence from the frontline, making plans in response to the issues that inevitably emerged.
All of it was fuelled by cake baked by matrons who had left children with grandparents and child minders, as well as poetry, photos of staff pulling together and lots of laughs. Our WhatsApp group ensured speedy responses as questions were asked from all corners of our organisation. Our Epic Educators were generating daily training sessions in response to what we learned, and we managed to turn around tip sheets and a round-up of the day’s learning every day, despite the inevitable exhaustion.

One community
We were a community with one goal: to ensure every nurse was supported to keep delivering excellent and safe patient care, and to have joy at work. No one would be left behind.
It seems unbelievable looking back, but it worked. Twenty-six years in the NHS and I’ve not experienced anything like it. I feel privileged to have experienced this with my colleagues, to have made such a significant and positive change to nursing practice.
And so: what does all this have to do with Bad Moms and Christmas? Well, as a nurse leader I had that mum sense of responsibility to ensure this experience was positive for every nurse in my UCLH family, that they had everything they wanted from the system. Like Mila, I put myself under undue pressure and like Mila’s fellow bad moms, my fellow nurse leaders stepped up and shared that pressure with a great deal of kindness and humour.

It doesn’t need to be perfect.
And just like any Christmas, despite all the mum planning, there were things that didn’t go as planned or expected. Like presents that didn’t quite fit (or the kids had changed their mind about since they wrote their list), or items missing from the Christmas dinner (cranberry sauce this year), it wasn’t a perfect Christmas. Even so, the key ingredients were there, and it was a happy one – a success.
Similarly, our Epic go-live felt like a rush to the finish line. It was exhilarating, fun, and had a few bumps, but most importantly, it was a success. The nursing family adapted to the unexpected, responding rapidly as we learned our new way of working. Everyone didn’t get all the presents they wanted – sometimes the presents they thought they wanted weren’t quite as good as they expected and they quickly discarded them, instead loving something they hadn’t asked for. Today, nurses at UCLH say unanimously that they love Epic and they would never go back to how things were before March 2019.
I think we might have given them the best Christmas present ever…two weeks before Easter.

Following on from being crowned CNIO of the Year at the Digital Health Awards 2019, Natasha Phillips discusses her health informatics career. The CNIO at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation trust explores why nurses are digitally interested and why the CNIO community should be nurtured.

On 31 March 2019 UCLH took the bold step of a big bang whole system digital transformation. For nursing, we took the decision not to just digitise what we already did but to change our practice.

We decided to return to and embed, nursing theory in the design of our electronic patient record, a move away from task orientated care and back to holistic nursing care. We also recognised the opportunity not to simply see our EHR as a tool for documenting care but as an intervention building in decision support underpinned by evidence-based practice.
We adopted a recognised evidence based standardised nursing terminology that would enable us to be frontrunners in generating evidence about nursing practice using the rich patient level data our EHR would contain.

Nurses are digitally interested
Before we could do this, we needed to confront our fears as a profession. Would the art of nursing be lost to the science? Would digital systems get in the way and overtake relationship? These fears were not unfounded; too often we see examples of where digital technology does not work for nurses.

This fact plays into myths that nurses are not digitally interested or capable. Only in September, at NHS Expo, it was suggested to me that nursing is a vocation and that is why nurses don’t do digital.

My blood pressure rose as I was reminded of the wearisome debate that so often emerges in the popular press that nursing is simply about caring and so surely a university education is not needed with headlines like ‘Nurses too posh to wash’.

Digital is every nurses’ business
I will leave the debate about the art and science of nursing for another day and propose an alternative reason why nurses may struggle with digital technologies in healthcare; usually they are not designed by nurses for nurses and too often they find themselves working with systems that do not address the challenges they face in their practice.

Systems that increase their workload reducing the time they can spend on the art of nursing – having meaningful interactions with patients that improve that patient experience and yield valuable information to improve patient outcomes.

Thanks to the bold approach the organisation has taken, we now have an array of nurses at UCLH whose roles support digital innovation and adoption, clinical systems designers, clinical practice educators, digital link nurses.

Through our digital transformation it has become clear that digital is every nurse’s business.

Nurturing the CNIO community
Enthusiasts have emerged in the process and a key element of my role as CNIO is to lead and nurture these communities and develop our strategy and clear career pathways to ensure we are a profession enabled by digital technology in our practice, education, research and the way we lead.

We have a shared vision to be a profession enabled by digital technology and having laid the foundation of one patient, one record, supported by evidence-based content, we are now in a position to deliver that vision.

As a CNIO I am part of an emergent national community and I see huge variation in the level of digital maturity people are working with but also in the value placed on the nursing contribution and the knowledge and skills of those working in the field.

Looking at the bigger picture
I find myself looking beyond my own organisation and asking what can we do as nurses to ensure patients and staff benefit from digitally enabled healthcare wherever they receive care or work and what is our unique contribution as a profession to this goal?

Nursing is about function not disease, it is about promoting health and enabling people to live their best lives with disability or disease in all settings.

This leaves nurses ideally placed to lead on innovations that support the vision laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

Nurses have a lot to offer
We have a lot to offer, and I conclude that to make this contribution we must start with ourselves as a professional workforce.

We must take the agenda seriously, invest in nurses creating a clear career pathway for those who wish to specialise in this field. This change has to be underpinned by education and so nurse leaders across practice, education and research should work together to generate a digital nursing pathway and change education to ensure nurses have the knowledge and skills not only to work in digital healthcare but to innovate and lead digital transformation.

It is only with a workforce with the right skills that we can hope to move not just to fundamental standards like digitised care records and information sharing across care pathways but to real innovations solving real problems, advancing practice.

I am increasingly hopeful that this is entirely possible; in my role as a CNIO, I have met numerous nurses with the experience and passion to lead digital healthcare, even when it is difficult to be heard and their contribution is undervalued.

The community is growing; I was at a recent CNIO event where twelve nursing networks were identified.

It is great to see so many digital nursing communities emerging; each with a unique contribution but it is also important that we are clear what our shared professional vision is and speak with one voice if we are to lead effectively, increase our impact and capitalise on our collective knowledge and strength to deliver the investment and work needed to shape our profession for the future and to realise the full potential of digital healthcare for the benefit of patients and staff alike.

In July 2019, the best and brightest in the healthcare IT community were celebrated at the second Digital Health Awards. Over the next few weeks Digital Health news will be publishing a series of profiles of the winners – first up is the CNIO of the Year, Natasha Phillips. She spoke to Owen Hughes about the work – and the people – who helped bag her the award.

The voice of the CNIO has become crucial to national conversations around how the NHS can digitise while keeping the interests and safety of patients front and centre.

Nurse leaders often face situations in which national directives compete with the expectation to do the best for patients. Making decisions that accommodate both, therefore, is no easy task.

As an NHS nurse of 26 years, Natasha Phillips, chief nursing information officer (CNIO) at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH), has ample experience of this delicate balancing act.

To Natasha, the CNIO role means marrying up organisational objectives with individual expectations, while still approaching the table with an open mind.

“The leadership process is naturally conflictual and requires courage, compassion and resilience,” she tells Digital Health News.

“IT projects are never just IT projects – they are people projects, so I bring this theory to work every day.”

Natasha began her NHS career as a nursing assistant at the North London Hospice, where she gained invaluable experience working as part of a multidisciplinary team delivering care to patients.

She then went on to train at the North Middlesex Hospital, where she recalls often feeling frustrated with organisational constraints that limited the care she could deliver.

“I would see opportunities to improve everywhere,” she says.

“The experience of providing exemplary care in an outstanding organisation, followed by my training experience, was a motivational force in driving me forward in my career.

From then on, Natasha made it her mission to pursue roles in which she could influence change.

“I always had an improvement project on the go wherever I worked,” she says.

“I guess ultimately that led me to this role. Along the way, I have been fortunate to work with some great people and have led some very large transformational programmes that have had informatics or technology at their heart.”

Of Epic proportions
Phillip’s astute and adaptive leadership style has earned her recognition amongst her peers, as well as a top accolade – in July, Natasha snagged the (highly coveted) CNIO of the Year Award at the 2019 Digital Health Summer Schools.
She drew commendation for her work on UCLH’s electronic patient record (EPR) programme, which saw UCLH become the second NHS trust to go live with a records system from US supplier Epic.

“It’s a great honour to be nominated,” she says.

“I’ve asked a lot of my nursing colleagues over the past two years, yet despite the additional work, they felt the change was worth it and thought enough of me to nominate me.

“I see this as ‘our’ award really, as we did this big shift in nursing at UCLH together. It’s an additional honour to be voted for by my peers – it quietens any self-doubts that I’ve had about my leadership in driving adoption of technology and informatics to advance nursing practice.”

UCLH deployed Epic’s EPR in April 2017, following a deal struck between the organisations nine months previous.
For Natasha, the project represented the largest piece of work she had ever been involved with and required overseeing a massive shake-up of nursing practice that saw tradition thrown out the door in the space of 24 hours.

“Overnight, they went from writing notes to doing all of their work with integrated digital technologies; observations on handheld devices, bar-coded medicines administration and blood transfusion, referrals, placing orders and planning care all in an electronic record, and still with the patient at the centre,” the CNIO recalls.

“The leadership shown by our matrons and ward leaders, the support provided by our nurse educators and the focus on providing the right tools by our nurse informaticists meant we had a culture of positivity and optimism, which brought us the biggest change our organisation has ever undertaken with relative ease.”

One particular element Natasha reflects on with fondness is the work her team undertook to standardise nursing assessments and plans of care, which involved embedding an international and standardised terminology within the EPR system.

“This supports decision-making at the bedside, prompting holistic nursing needs assessments and plans of care for all of our patients,” she explains.

“As well as ensuring the care we deliver today is based on best evidence, the use of structured data will enable us to generate evidence about the outcomes of nursing care and potentially design algorithms that can predict risks of avoidable harms, like pressure ulcers.

“It supports our ward accreditation process at UCLH, enabling us to recognise and celebrate success, drive improvement and offer additional support where needed.”

The future’s bright
As well as reaping short-term benefits, the efforts undertaken by Natasha and her team poises the trust for future rewards.

“We are now at the exciting point where we see what our next changes are, what we want to optimise and where we need to reinforce learning,” she says.

“We have a wealth of data at our fingertips and a need for more nurses, with the time and skill to use this to drive patient safety, quality improvement and patient experience.

“I am most proud of this change because it forms the basis of a digital transformation of our nursing practice and our nurses have embraced that potential fully. The future is exciting.”

19 FEBRUARY, 2020 BY GEMMA MITCHELL

Source: University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
A digital nurse leader from University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been appointed as the first-ever national chief nursing information officer.

Natasha Phillips will start in the new role at NHSX in April this year and will be tasked with leading the NHS technology agenda as it applies to nursing and midwifery practice in England.

“I look forward to working with all the great digital nurse leaders out there”.

Natasha Phillips
Moving from her current job of chief nursing information officer at the London trust, Dr Phillips will also be responsible for ensuring patients, staff and the public are engaged in digital transformation.

Responding to her appointment, Dr Phillips said: “I am thrilled to be taking on the role of the first national CNIO, especially in the year of the nurse.

“I look forward to working with all the great digital nurse leaders out there to advance nursing practice and improve the working lives of nurses.

“I will be sad to leave UCLH, it is a great organisation that has given me wonderful opportunities to grow, learn and make a difference to staff and patients.

“I will take that forward into this new and exciting role.”

Announcing the appointment on social media, English chief nursing officer Ruth May described Dr Phillips as “brilliant” and added: “Great to see nurses leading our tech transformation.”

Simon Eccles, chief clinical information officer and deputy chief executive of NHSX, said he was “delighted” with the new appointment.

He added that Dr Phillips would “bring huge skills and knowledge to our team”.

Set to earn £100,000 a year, Dr Phillips will report to Dr Eccles and will be professionally accountable to Ms May.

“Great to see nurses leading our tech transformation”

Ruth May

Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive and general secretary at the Royal College of Nursing, offered her congratulations to Dr Phillips.

She added: “We look forward to working with Natasha in trying to ensure that, in the future, every nurse is an e-nurse.

“It’s great news that we’ve now reached a point where many NHS organisations recognise the role of nurses in planning and adapting IT infrastructure, and we are committed to making the case that all health and care organisations need a nursing information officer.

“To ensure technological advances in the health and care system genuinely improve patient care, it’s essential that nurses are consulted, and their views reflected in all technology solutions.”

A University College London Hospitals spokesperson said the trust was “delighted” that Dr Phillips, who has been a member of its senior nursing team since 2012, had been chosen for the national role.

“Among her many achievements, she designed and led the Exemplar Ward programme and, more recently, as our chief nursing information officer, she was a key member of our programme team implementing our first integrated electronic health record system,” the spokesperson added.

“We are sad to see her leave, but we know that she is going on to bigger and better things and will continue making a difference in her national role.”

NHSX revealed in a Twitter post in July last year that a chief nurse role focused on digital was being created.

It came after health and social care secretary Matt Hancock was questioned on the matter by primary care digital transformation nurse Jenny Smith during the 2019 English CNO Summit in March.

“It’s essential that nurses are consulted, and their views reflected in all technology solutions”

Donna Kinnair
Ms Smith highlighted the lack of nurse representation in the current structure of NHSX and called for this to be addressed.

“You can see the CCIO and you can see the portfolio team is in there but there is no CNO that I can see,” she said.

Responding, Mr Hancock said: “If we don’t yet have that already in the structure, then that’s something we need to look at… we’ll take that away as homework.”

The introduction of the brand-new role got off to a rocky start after a pause was forced in the recruitment process due to concerns over race inequality.

In the specifications, experience on an executive board was listed as an “essential requirement” for getting the job.

The advertisement was temporarily pulled at the end of last year after critics pointed out that very few nursing directors were from a black or minority ethnic background.

Board-level experience was subsequently moved from “essential” to “desirable”.

Natasha Phillips has been named the chief nursing information officer for NHSX.

Phillips, who has been a nurse for 26 years, is the current chief nursing information officer (CNIO) at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH).

Ruth May, chief nursing officer for England, announced the appointment on Twitter. Phillips will take up her role at NHSX in April.

Simon Eccles, NHSX’s CCIO and deputy CEO, tweeted to say he was “delighted” by her appointment.

Phillips was named Digital Health’s CNIO of the Year in 2019 and is a columnist for the site.

Following the award, she told Digital Health the CNIO role meant marrying up organisational objectives with individual expectations, while still approaching the table with an open mind.

Phillips will be speaking at Rewired 2020 on 4 March at London Olympia. Register now to see her live in the CCIO/CIO Theatre talking about UCLH’s Epic clinical informatics journey (11am) and a panel session with other 2019 Digital Health Awards winners (2pm).

As with any profession in healthcare, nursing has changed substantially as digital solutions become commonplace, and as the first national Chief Nursing Information Officer takes up her post this week it’s set to continue evolving. To mark International Nurses Day, Digital Health News spoke to Natasha Phillips about the future of nursing.

A nurse of 26 years, Natasha has seen myriad changes during her career. The Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO) at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) was named NHSX’s first CNIO in February and officially took up her post on 11 May.

Her first point of business? Identifying who the digital champions are and bringing together networks of nurses interesting in digital with the aim of eventually getting a CNIO in every organisation.

“My ambitions for the Long Term Plan and the nursing contribution there are that we move patient care out from hospitals as much as we can, have much less outpatient appointments, have much clearer integrated care for patients and to really encourage active participants,” she tells Digital Health News.

“Nursing is about function, it’s not about disease, so we help people to live their best lives. We have nurses working across all across the continuum from the social care sector to primary care to secondary care, adults, children, mental health, and actually all of those nurses have a unique relationship with their patients that mean they’re able to identify the technologies that will be most supportive.”

Inclusion in the decision-making process is vital, Natasha says, as nurses know what will work for them and their patients. As is encouraging digital nurses to bring other nurses along on the journey.

“Every organisation needs a nurse at the executive table talking about digital. Every chief nurse in every organisation should know is their nurse who knows digital and how often are they meeting with them to learn how digital can help,” she says.

“I would like us to say that there’s a CNIO in every organisation, I don’t think that’s unrealistic and I think it’s absolutely necessary.
“But if we’re going to say that we need to be very clear about role description and the knowledge and skills that are necessary for people to have.”

The move towards digital nurses in every organisation is reliant on support for those wanting to become a CNIO, Natasha explains.
For example, nurses are poorly represented on the Digital Academy, she says, adding that she plans to work with organisations to ensure the right training is available to encourage nurses to go digital.

“That way nurses can then use their voice in a much more powerful way and have a clear plan on what they are each doing in their area to ensure that nursing care using technology to best effect.”

Natasha knows first-hand the benefit of having a digital nursing expert involved in a trust’s decision making. The Digital Health CNIO of the Year in 2019 has drawn commendation from colleagues for her work on UCLH’s electronic patient record (EPR) programme, which saw UCLH become the second NHS trust to go live with a records system from US supplier Epic.

The go-live saw nursing at the trust change within 24-hours, from a system requiring nurses to manually write notes to one with integrated digital technologies and observations on handheld devices.

A change Natasha says would not have been as smooth without a nurses input, highlighting again the importance of CNIOs.

Friendly advice
To nurses thinking about taking a digital career path, with the aim of becoming a CNIO, “`Natasha says to view it as a speciality and to take the opportunities to learn from others.

“Bring your basic nursing knowledge and enhance it with a new type of knowledge which would be the digital side of things,” she says.
“If they’re going to do that, look at what knowledge and skills you need and where you’re going to get it. Develop a really good professional development plan, join networks and find opportunities for learning from others.

“I hope that in three years from now that it will all be laid out for them so it’s obvious, but for now people are just having to make it up for themselves. I’d like to think we will have access to the right practice, funding and education so that they can become nurses who are specialists in digital information.”

Going digital
Reflecting back on her career Natasha has seen nursing change from a profession with very little in the way of enabling technologies, to one that has embraced technology.

“During my practice much has changed, and we moved to digital thermometers, machines to do vital signs, integrated patient monitors and ventilators on the ICU. We first saw electronic patient records in intensive care, and it has been too slow for that to move beyond the walls of critical care,” she says.

“There is still so much variability in the amount of technologies available to nurses despite many years of advances. For many of us we still use far more technology in our everyday lives at home than we do at work. Yet we know there are clear benefits for patients when we can use technology to support the way we care for them.

“Embracing technology is vital for the advancement of all four pillars of clinical practice; education, research, leadership and practice. Arguably digital is the fifth pillar of advanced practice.

“To accelerate the nursing contribution to digital healthcare we need a shared vision and plan and nurses with the expertise necessary to lead the profession. I hope to lead on the development of such a strategy focusing not only on the what but on the people plan necessary to deliver that what.”

On starting her new role as NHSX CNIO Natasha feels she has a responsibility to the profession to advance its capabilities.

“Florence Nightingale wold be at the forefront of digital nursing care if she were here today, as a statistician she would be actively leading the use of big data to improve the health of the population. If I were superstitious I’d say it’s a good omen to be starting my join as CNIO at NHSX in the week of her anniversary and the year of the nurse,” she adds.
“But I am not superstitious and I know it is the vision of our Chief Nurse and digital nurse activists like the digital nurse network who have put me here. I feel a responsibility to support the profession have a voice and to advance our practice in service of our patients together.”

Natasha will be a panelist on a Digital Health webinar on Friday, May 22. The webinar will discuss the results of Digital Health Intelligence’s first survey of CNIO Network members.

It offers a chance to learn about some of the key findings of the survey, and to hear from senior nursing figures on their thoughts about what it means for where we go next.

May 19, 2021
NHSX digital dream team confirmed for Summer School
NHSX’s digital dream team of Dr Simon Eccles, Dr Natasha Phillips and Sonia Patel have all been confirmed as speakers for the Virtual Summer School 2021, 15-16 July.

Sonia, Natasha and Simon will each host dedicated workshops exploring the evolving challenges of digital leadership in the NHS and the continued development of local leaders in the CIO, CNIO and CCIO roles.
The Summer School workshops will explore the changing nature of digital leadership in the post-Covid NHS, and provide delegates with a great opportunity to learn how the professional development of NHS leaders will next be supported nationally.

The CNIO at NHS England has said a review into the digital readiness of nurses and midwives will help the profession ‘think collectively’.

Speaking at Summer Schools 2022 in York on July 15, Natasha Phillips introduced the Phillips Ives Nursing and Midwifery Review, which was first launched in May 2022.

Led by Dr Phillips and Dr Jeanette Ives Erickson, the aim of the review is to help inform strategy, ensuring that nurses and midwives are given access to the knowledge, skills and education required for safe, effective digitally-enabled practice.

“One of the main reasons why we’re doing this [the review] is we need to think about things collectively as a profession, which means we need to bring in the non-digital people,” she told attendees.

The review will consider seven themes organised under three advisory panels:

• Exploiting data and science (genomics and AI, data science and research)
• Person centred (nursing in a place-based health and social care system, merging technologies and opportunities)
• Practice and development (professionalisation of the specialist digital nursing and midwife workforce, workforce planning and preparation for practice)

A review into the digital readiness of nurses and midwives has been launched and aims to make sure the workforce is equipped for the future.

The Phillips Ives Nursing and Midwifery Review will be led by Dr Natasha Phillips, chief nursing information officer at NHS England and Dr Jeanette Ives Erickson will serve as an international vice-chair. The aim of the review is to ensure that the nursing and midwifery workforce is equipped to deal with any future technological challenges.

Building on the work of the 2019 Topol Review, the project will call on evidence from across the nursing and midwifery workforce as well as wider professions within the NHS and from abroad. It is expected it will take around a year for the review to be completed.

A timeline of the Phillips Ives review

The review will address four key questions:
• How are technological and other developments likely to change the roles and functions of the nursing and midwifery workforce?
• What are the implications of the size, shape and skills of this workforce?
• What does this mean for selection, curricula, education, training, development and lifelong learning of the current and future nursing and midwifery workforce?
• What are the considerations for inclusion, equality and diversity?
Key themes of the review include workforce planning, AI and data science and emerging technologies and opportunities.

Dr Phillips said: “Nurses and midwives are often the face of the NHS for the public, looking after patients and their families at the happiest times in their life, such as the birth of a child, and at some of the most difficult.
“As the NHS looks to the future and the increasing role played by digital and technology, it is important we ensure our nurses and midwives receive an education that will prepare them for the NHS of tomorrow.”

Findings from the review will help shape the NHS’s future digital strategy and will ensure that nurses and midwives are provided with the knowledge, skills and education required for safe, effective digitally-enabled practice.

The review will be conducted by Health Education England as part of its Digital Readiness Education Programme in partnership with NHS England.

Dr Ives Erickson added: “It is an honour to work with colleagues across the globe to advance nursing practice ensuring our discipline leads in the digital healthcare system of today and in the future.
“This is a focused review with four key principles that will influence the educational and care delivery systems for our future workforce, will inform strategy, enhance safety, and will embed efficiencies into systems of care delivery. A big and important initiative”.

You can get involved with the review here.

Published on 30 November 2022, by Natasha Phillips

The week began with Dr Jeanette Ives Erickson flying in from the USA, who I was delighted to host. Despite being on many calls, it dawned on me that this was the first in person meeting of Phillips and Ives!

Jeanette had a busy schedule, including meeting the Review team, the Florence Nightingale Foundation Scholars and the Phillips Ives Review Fellows.

Just being in Jeanette’s presence you could see the important role she plays as International Co-Chair of the Phillips Ives Nursing and Midwifery Review, offering a breadth of experience in professionalising informatics into nursing and midwifery.

Attending the CNO Summit
Towards the end of the visit, we, along with Tracey Eyre, Programme Lead for the Review, attended the CNO Summit, where both Jeanette and I were scheduled to speak.

Arriving at the event in London you felt the excitement, as for the first time in over two years colleagues were meeting in person. The room buzzed with anticipation, ready to hear the latest developments across nursing.

Ruth May, CNO for England started the two-days interviewing NHS England Chief Executive Amanda Pritchard.

It was fantastic to hear Amanda acknowledge the NHS receiving the George Cross, and recognising the nursing workforce for their ability to be flexible during the pandemic, and continuing to deliver care.
Amanda recognised the value that digital innovation provides, making mention of virtual wards, remote monitoring, and other tech enabled models to enable recovery.

Ruth then launched the start of the work on the CNO strategy, which will set out the direction of travel and ambitions for the profession over the next three to five years.

This is an important piece of work, and I envision the outcomes of the Phillips Ives Review will inform these findings.

To support this work, I encourage all nursing and midwifery colleagues to get involved in the consultation by completing this survey that will help influence the strategy.

What role can digital play across nursing?
As other sessions took place, I thought about the role that digital has and could play.

The Genomics session was inspiring as we heard how it’s been applied to ovarian and breast cancer services, and this is an area that can be enhanced by digital innovation.

The Phillips Ives Review has a panel looking at Genomics, asking questions around the role of the nurse in this important work to gather data in effective IT systems and organisation structures.

It was fantastic to see the CNO Research strategy on the agenda, which has the fifth theme looking at Digitally enabled nurse-led research.
Digital and data has a lot of potential to accelerate the pace of nurse-led research, and we’ve started work to drive this forward, by building a community of nurse researchers eager to utilise the power of digital technology.

Building a workforce for the future: an international perspective
Jeanette shared her international perspective as part of the panel ‘Building and maintaining our nursing and midwifery workforce – for now and for the future.’

The audience hung on every word as Jeanette talked about the moral distress the workforce faced during and after the COVID pandemic, working incredibly hard to provide care for patients at such a difficult time with the available resources.

She invited the room to be more compassionate about themselves, recognise the impact we make, and reminding us that we are the most trusted profession.

We heard about Jeanette’s experiences setting up a field hospital in Boston during this time, echoing the sentiments felt by NHS staff who were responsible for getting the Nightingale hospitals up and running.
As International Vice-Chair she introduced the work of the Phillips Ives Review and its importance relating to educating the workforce in digital to this senior nurse leadership audience.

Digital nursing’s contribution to continuous improvement
Then we had my session ‘Continuous Improvement and digital transformation: now and next steps.’

Although I’ve spoken hundreds of times on the big stage, I still get nervous in situations like this, so many peers I respect, so many still not quite familiar or bought into the digital transformation message.

And today it was down to myself to represent the voice of digital nurses and midwives – to give justice to my peers for all the great work they’re doing, while being able to emphasise the importance of our agenda.
Some in the crowd you may refer to as the digital enthusiasts, those ready and willing to adopt digital. The rest were more the digitally curious (or digitally cautious!) – unaware of the potential digital change offers to care and the way we work.

I used the time as an opportunity to highlight the fantastic work being done in digital nursing, building up communities like the Chief Nursing Informatics Officers (CNIO) network and Digital Shared Decision Making Council, the progress being made on the Guidance for Nursing on What Good Looks Like, and the important role the Phillips Ives Review will play in continuous improvement, ensuring we define the training needs to adapt.

I announced that the outcomes of the Review will be published in 2023, showing the direction we must take.

The challenge is to get buy-in, not just to attendees of the CNO summit, but across healthcare, as everyone will have a role to play in our digital future:

Centrally designed – regionally led – locally delivered

That is why the Phillips Ives Review matters, defining 5, 10, 20 years down the line how we go about educating and train our nursing and midwifery workforce.

Thank you for your support!

Dr Natasha Phillips
Chief Nursing Information Officer for England.
NHS England

Dr Natasha Phillips is the Chief Nursing Information Officer for England and Co-Chair of the Phillips Ives Nursing and Midwifery Review. She is Alumni of the Florence Nightingale Foundation and an honorary Research Fellow at University College London

On the 1st September, we were very excited to welcome Dr Natasha Phillips, Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO) at NHSx, who visited us at SCFT to find out more about our digital transformation projects.

Natasha is the first national CNIO, and her appointment was a great step forward for nursing in the digital space. You can read a bit more about Natasha and her role here: Natasha Phillips reveals her ambitions for NHSX (digitalhealth.net).

Natasha was accompanied by some other NHSx colleagues:

• Sonia Patel, CIO
• Sara Nelson, Associate CNIO
• Helen Balsdon, Associate CNIO and Florence Nightingale Fellow

The NHSx team were hoping to build their understanding of community services delivery, as most of our visitors had a predominantly acute clinical background. They wanted to know what unique challenges we face when looking to realise the benefits digital can bring.

We began the day in the Arundel Suite at Brighton General Hospital, where our Chief Nurse Donna Lamb and our Chief Digital and Technology Officer Diarmaid Crean gave a presentation introducing our Trust. They talked about our digital strategy, and our plans to make sure clinical staff are leading on it. This presentation generated some fantastic discussion with our NHSx visitors, ensuring that our agenda went out of the window almost immediately! Subjects covered were how to educate future digital nurses, how to help our existing and future workforce keep pace with digital changes, and how to make sure digital innovations and changes are safe for patients and useful for staff. We also talked about how to influence our suppliers to create products we need.

We then moved on to some presentations about specific digital projects going on at SCFT, including electronic prescribing and medication administration (EPMA), AutoPlanner and our new children’s continence app. This was a wonderful opportunity to show the national team, and our own SCFT colleagues, some of the brilliant work going on in so many services to use digital tools to enhance patient care.

Lastly, our visitors made visits to the Lewes ICU, the Brighton community nursing team and the Brighton responsive services, where they met clinicians and talked to them about recent digital transformation projects, and how digital tools are impacting their working lives.

We were delighted to receive wonderful feedback from the NHSx team, who told us how impressed they were by our commitment to digital clinical safety, and our enthusiasm to take forward the digital health revolution! Natasha kindly sent us a slide deck which outlines their priorities at NHSx, which we have shared here for you to look at. If you are interested in knowing more about being a digital nurse, or have any questions or comments, please contact the Digital Nurse Specialists at sc-tr.digitalclinicalsafety@nhs.net. If you’d like to watch a video of the NHSx visit and receive the presentation that Dr Natasha Phillips gave, please email our Digital Communications Lead Claire at Claire.Cross6@nhs.net.

Thank you to all those who were involved in the visit, whether you were presenting, hosting in a clinical team, setting up the room or providing tea and sandwiches. It was a great success thanks to you all!

Written by Vivienne Raper

Discover the latest developments in the vibrant fields of digital nursing, midwifery, allied health professions and pharmacy with a dedicated stage at Digital Health Rewired 2023.

The Digital Nursing Summit will showcase some of the best leaders, teams, and initiatives from across the NHS.

Highlights of the programme include Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, chief midwifery officer in England who will be giving a keynote on how allied healthcare professionals can unite to deliver frontline services.

Dunkley-Bent will be joined for the keynote panel by Rahul Singal, associate CCIO for medicines at NHS England and Beverley Harden, allied health professions (AHP) lead and deputy chief allied health professions officer at Health Education England.

A further keynote during the two-day stage will highlight the potential of AHPs and pharmacists in digital health with speakers including Lesley Holdsworth, clinical director of the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate.

Other speakers include Dr Natasha Phillips, chief nursing information officer (CNIO) at NHS England who will be presenting key findings of the major review she co-led into the digital readiness of nurses and midwives. Launched virtually in May 2022, the Phillips Ives review set out to identify how nurses can be empowered to lead, as well as practice, digitally-enabled health and social care.

The session on the findings and next steps of the review will also feature panellists including Professor Ruth Endacott, director of nursing and midwifery at the National Institute for Health Research.

Also looking to the future will be a quick-fire session on the next generation of digital nurses and midwives, featuring speakers including Antonia Brown, a Florence Nightingale Foundation Digital Scholar for 2021 and deputy chief nursing information officer at Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust.

The Digital Nursing Summit at this year’s Rewired will conclude with a big debate titled ‘What’s in a Name’, featuring a panel of speakers that include Professor Louise Hicks, CNIO and director of development at Barts Health NHS Trust, and Misbah Mahmood, deputy chief midwifery information officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

They along with the rest of the panel will discuss the evolving landscape of titles and roles in digital healthcare before delving into the impact on digital nursing, midwifery, AHP, and pharmacy.

This year the Digital Nursing Summit is sponsored by Boots – the first time the high street retailer has had such a prominent role at Rewired.

The move reflects Boots’ growing presence in the digital healthcare market, and its commitment to providing people with safe and convenient digitally-enabled health services.

It recently became the first retail healthcare business to partner with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), paving the way for Boots team members to become accredited digital healthcare leaders.

The association with the Digital Nursing Summit is a perfect fit for the company, suggested chief information officer Rich Corbridge: “Increasing our connections to community healthcare is probably our biggest goal, therefore it makes sense to look at how we can be involved in that part of Rewired.”

Director of healthcare Jamie Kerruish emphasised that by participating in Rewired, Boots is making a statement about its potential to partner with the NHS: “I see this as an invitation – it is demonstrating what we are trying to achieve for people and how we can help. Every partnership is welcome.”

Taking place on March 14-15 at the Business Design Centre in London, Digital Health Rewired 2023 is a conference and exhibition that brings together all parts of the digital health community to celebrate the best of digital, data and innovation in health and care.

Health and care professionals will be able to network, collaborate and learn in person during two days of educational conference sessions, exhibitions, and meetings, all focused on sharing best practice and innovation.

All the conference sessions will be CPD accredited.

Returning for its fifth year is the Pitchfest competition, which will be split into two categories for 2023. The competition will see 23 shortlisted candidates battle it out, with the best start-up winning an NHS test bed for their idea or solution.