Digital Fellowship Evaluation

University Hospitals Sussex have established a Digital Fellowship with two digital fellows, who are in their foundation years of medical training. One of the primary aims of the fellowship is to equip fellows with the necessary skills to contribute to the delivery of one or more digital health improvement projects, identified as part of the Trust’s roadmap and aligned to the Trust’s digital strategy, Integrated Care System (ICS) digital ambition, and NHS Long Term Plan.

University Hospitals Sussex made several commitments to support the two fellows. This included attendance to a digital leader training (induction) programme targeted at digital nurses and delivered by Kent Surrey Sussex Academic Health Science Network (KSS AHSN, now trading as Health Innovation KSS) and Unity Insights. The digital leader training was designed to support the induction and development of clinicians, including digital fellows involved in digital programmes, by providing a training programme of webinars.

Unity Insights worked to evaluate the impact of the Digital Fellowship on the fellows, their teams, and the Trust in addition to evaluating the training programme provided. We did this through surveys and interviews to obtain real-time data during the fellowship, and rich insights.

This work has demonstrated the impact of the Digital Fellowship for future years and provides recommendations to the Trust for how to improve the fellowship, ensuring maximum value is reached.

The training programme by KSS AHSN (now trading as Health Innovation KSS) was re-commissioned with delivery of another training programme in Kent. This demonstrates the success from the programme and positive feedback, as two new fellows will now also have access to this training.