West Midlands health informatics network : a perspective on education and training needs

The growth of health informatics as a discipline has led to an increase in networks of people with similar interests for discussion, learning and sharing. Alongside these community networks, education and training are gaining interest, with more career opportunities and general public seeking information. This paper highlights the experience of the West Midlands Health Informatics Network and efforts in better understanding the educational and training needs of its members. The findings from the survey conducted reveal that while the interest in this field is high among network members, the awareness of opportunities for training and learning professionally as well as personally, remains low. The areas and levels of interest in the region should help support the creation and availability of resources

A query tool enabling clinicians and researchers to explore patient cohorts

Due to the increasing amount of health information being gathered and the potential benefit of data reuse, it is now becoming a necessity for tools, which collect and analyse this data, to support integration of heterogeneous datasets, as well as provide intuitive user interfaces, which allow clinicians and researchers to query the data without needing to form complex SQL queries. The West Midlands Query Tool consists of an easy-to-use graph-based GUI, which interacts with a flexible middleware application. It has the main objective of querying heterogeneous data sources for exploring patient cohorts through a query builder and criteria set

Scoping Review of the Literature on Workforce Models, Workforce Planning and Development Approaches [Appendix 1]

This paper provides a scoping review of the literature on workforce models and workforce planning and development approaches relevant to the specialist data, information and knowledge workforce in health and social care. The search of the bibliographic databases (see appendix B for search strategy) initially identified 69 potentially relevant papers; further focus identified 18 potentially relevant papers; detailed review identified 11 relevant papers. The identified grey literature related wholly to public health workforce development (England and Scotland); and existing frameworks, which are covered in the paper providing the high level mapping of relevant existing capability/competency/ career frameworks (August 2018). This paper outlines the findings of the published literature