Actions to Empower Digital Competences in Healthcare Workforce: A Qualitative Approach

While healthcare systems are taking advantage of the ICT to improve healthcare services, healthcare workforce needs additional competencies in order to continue the provision of the best achievable care. In this paper emphasis is given to an active research effort taken during the MEI2015 Conference. Based on hands-on group-work, participants identified the actions needed to boost the acquisition of IT competences by healthcare workforce and collaboratively indicated the most important actions. The leading priority actions were integration of IT into Curriculum, continuous IT/eHealth training at the work place, raising awareness of IT competences, participatory decisions for actions, match healthcare applications to users' own context, inclusion of professionals in the development of eHealth projects. Interestingly, the proposed actions coupling the outcomes of another study following a different methodology, but also support the cooperation opportunities on IT skills for healthcare workforce. The latter formed a set of recommendations which were proposed within the CAMEI coordination and support action of EC-FP7.