eHealth NSW digital academy opens to all state health workers

eHealth NSW has opened a digital academy of courses to all of NSW Health's 160,000-plus staff across the state.

The digital academy kicked off in late 2019, initially just for eHealth NSW staff. It had two training streams, cloud and agile, and was aimed at existing infrastructure and application support staff to retrain around digital and cloud-based tools and techniques.

eHealth NSW service delivery executive director Farhoud Salimi told AWS re:Invent 2022 last week that the academy now has seven streams, covering also data analytics, human-centred design and patient safety disciplines.

Two more streams are also set to be added: the academy intends to add an integration and interoperability security stream and a cyber security stream, which is currently being made “more interactive”.

As eHealth NSW works on a mass cloud transformation, which will see its applications migrated onto the public cloud by 2025, staff can be trained in the necessary skills through the academy.

Salimi said the academy is more than "just online learning or classroom sessions; It's all about a holistic learning program for employees that they can actually interact with, so it's not just go through a module and come back home, or do a certification come back home".

eHealth NSW uses communities of practice, community days, lunch-and-learn sessions, Q&As, game days and hackathons to reinforce and refine skills developed through the academy.

"We've had 8400 completions of any of those courses or game days since we've started this journey," Salimi said.

"We [also] had about 1000 people that are now trained fully in cloud which is pretty impressive, considering we started a couple of years ago."

Salimi said that training was customised for a healthcare-specific setting. 

He said a survey had shown that 78 percent of people that passed through the academy had applied knowledge they picked up back at work, while 81 percent had seen improvement in their ability to deliver "more confidently and efficiently."

Salimi added that he was pleased to see non-technical staff such as clinicians benefitting from the training, and learning how to apply digital and cloud technology in clinical settings.

"As a result of all this, we've actually now opened this training program up to the entire NSW Health, so 160,000-plus people can actually enrol and learn," Salimi said.

He added that eHealth NSW has also invested time in creating clearer career pathways for staff with academy training programs matched to those pathways.

Kate Weber attended AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas as a guest of AWS.