Digital Skills Development in Healthcare: Insights from NVZ, NFU, and ZKN Members Meeting

The meeting was organized for everyone who is involved in learning and development and works for NVZ, NFU or ZKN members. About 60 participants attended the program in Kontakt der Kontinenten in Soesterberg. They included HR and Training managers, CMIOs and CNIOs, learning & development advisors, physician assistants, digital care project leaders, Everyone’s Digital Skills project manager, digital skills management trainer, consultants digitization staff, HR business partner, policy advisors. and operations managers. A wide range of responsibilities, which immediately shows that strengthening the digital skills of employees is not within one department: it concerns everyone in the healthcare center.

The participants enjoyed the in-depth presentations from 2 experts: Martijn Aslander and Eveline Wouters. After each presentation, the participants discussed what was said with their table mates. The main questions were: what are you already doing in this area? What can you start tomorrow? What do you need for that? This provided illuminating insights.

Digital fitness

Martijn Aslander calls himself a philosopher of technology. He is the founder of the foundation Digital Fitness and the creator of the popular hashtag #dtv. Aslander is a man with a mission: to make the world more digitally accessible. “You are intelligence workers. The amazing thing: no one ever taught us how to process information. We just do anything. Video calling is the biggest mental challenge ever; crime The computer would make our life more fun and easier, but in fact it is better to stay away from it as much as possible. How do you do more in less time?”

“We don’t like to change, because that takes 8x more energy than leaving everything as it is. Learning and change happens best when you do it yourself and when you do it again,” says Aslander’s 5-Pillar Digital Fitness Tool, found at Digital Fitness. This model applies to anyone who spends more than 4.5 hours a day in front of a screen. “That time is the most time a knowledge worker can devote energy to doing their job each day. Part in the morning, part in the evening. We still think about working with your hands, and you can do it all day. The idea that ‘more screen time means more productivity’ is wrong. You can no longer differentiate between primary and secondary issues. The younger generation deal with this better than older people, they are more likely to choose to work a maximum of 4 days a week and a maximum of 5 hours a day. We are not made for screens!”

Technology is a human work

In the second presentation, participants gained insight into the factors that contribute to the adoption and implementation of digital technology by healthcare workers. Eveline Wouters from Tilburg University identified several theoretical models.

Wouters discussed, among other things, the ‘technology acceptance model’ (TAM, technology acceptance model). That’s about the question: do people find it useful and is it easy to use? If so, this contributes to their perception of use, intention to use and actual use. Social influencers also play a role in acceptance, as is the question of whether the innovation is compulsory or voluntary, how much it costs, how common it is now ( such as a mobile phone) and whether there is ‘hedonic motivation’. : is it ‘nice to see’, or a stigma like a support button on a chain. “What you have to take into account if you want to increase technology: you can learn from each other, but the situation is never the same everywhere. “

Model COMB-B

Another model that helps to understand why people do something is the COM-B model. This assumes that a combination of ability, opportunity and motivation leads to behaviour. Take, for example, an elderly person who does not need technology and ends up living in a nursing home. During corona, it was not possible to communicate with the family, except for a mobile phone. This can be an incentive to use a mobile phone (opportunity).

The technological change must be carefully coordinated in advance by each organization. A theory that deals with this is the Normalization Process Theory. This model is based on 4 structures: does everyone understand how useful it is, how long will people be involved in this, what will happen in terms of joint action (help desk, time to learn) and is there reflection/analysis: looking back on how the innovation has gone? The latter is rarely done, notes Eveline Wouters.

Are you interested in this topic? Follow the Kennisnet group

On the NVZ Kennisnet you will find the group Kennisnet Digital skills. With news, agenda, bulletin board, questions and answers and documents.

go to Home | NVZ knowledge network and log in with username and password (for NVZ members only). Find digital skills and sign up for a Kennisnet group. There is also an extended version of the article above, with the presentations by Aslander and Wouters.