Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO) Highlights: 2024

The CNIO team at NHS England have continued it's work to make digital mainstream across the nursing and midwifery professions.

Here are our highlights from 2024 sharing lots of useful links - so make sure to bookmark to read later!

Nursing Documentation

Following the launch of principles to outline good nursing and midwifery documentation, the Nursing Care Needs Standard was released to support standardisation around the eating and drinking, mobility, elimination, personal hygiene and dressing, skin and medication self-management of a patients record.

Further sharing of knowledge around nursing documentation took place with two online masterclasses. Over 1,500 people registered for the session enabling them first access to listen to the recordings.

“Really inspiring and thought-provoking presentations from a variety of settings. Great to hear of the team’s experiences, lessons learned and how to overcome challenges.”

Special thank you to our presenters Paula Anderson, Sam Neville, Becca Robinson, Emily Burch, Sarah Hanbridge, Jessie Dhaliwal and Vince Barlow for sharing your expertise.

Digital Maternity Record Standards

An update on the Digital Maternity Record Standard took place with the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB) to reflect changes in clinical practice within? maternity and perinatal care in line with the prioritise outlined in NHS England’s three year delivery plan.

This work involved a series of consultations with over 500 clinicians and service users? working in or accessing maternity services. The new draft standard looks to be published in 2025.

Maternity Databanks

The Digital Midwife Leadership community have strived forward with an inspiring project focused on digital poverty working with the Good Things Foundation charity.

There has been a national drive to rollout digital hubs within maternity services across the country.

Trusts have partnered with the Good Things Foundation to provide free data to pregnant people under their care who would otherwise be unable to access the internet, enabling them to access essential resources without judgement.

So far over 70 trusts have setup a maternity databank with more planning to implement one.

Midwives can find out how to get involved in this initiative here

Clinical Results Release Guidance

In efforts to empower patients to self-manage their care through apps and online services, there is a very real risk that diagnoses such as cancer could be communicated to patient first before they have a chance to speak with a clinician.

The Clinical guidance for automation of results release in patient engagement portals was developed in the CNIO team to introduce safe timing and continue support to enable self-care.

This work provides developers of patient engagement portals with principles to manage the release of results through electronic means.

Community Nursing

We continued conversation around the needs of community nurses, holding a workshop to understand their technical requirements to perform their role.

The QNI report Nursing in the Digital Age (2023), outlines some of the issues faced such as infrastructure issues, problems with hardware and software, and repetition of data entry. Our discussions focused on how we develop community nursing digital leadership to support and address these needs.

Site visits

We’ve been to see ten different organisations across the country on site visits, many of these were attended by both Helen Balsdon and Jules Gudgeon (CMidIO) to champion that nursing and midwifery is #StrongerTogether to drive change.

Each visit presented unique challenges faced in areas, along with having the opportunity for nurse/midwife led teams to showcase the hard work they are doing in organisations to provide greater care by harnessing the potential of digital and data.

These visits inspired the team so much that it drove the creation of the CNIO FutureNHS Community Case Studies as we felt that with all the good practice happening across the country that this should be shared as wide as possible.

Guidance for Nursing and Midwifery on What Good Looks Like

Since its release in March 2022 digital midwives have run with this guidance to apply its recommendations to their workplace.

Recognising the demand to tailor the guidance to midwifery and refreshing to the 2024 landscape we ran a working group to make improvements. This enabled us to release a new iteration in the summer of the seven success measures, now called the Guidance for Nursing and Midwifery on What Good Looks Like.

Career Frameworks

Our consultation which looked at the training and education needs of the Nursing and Midwifery workforce to use digital and data – The Phillips Ives Review found that the clinical digital specialist workforce wanted a set career pathway, so they understood what skills and competencies they needed to develop to perform the role.

We put together a draft framework of what this looks like and sent to senior nurses and midwives for their feedback. Currently we are analysing the results to apply improvements for a future release.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in reality

“What role does artificial intelligence play for nurses and midwives” is a question we’ve heard a lot since this innovative technology exploded onto the scene.

To get direction on this question we kicked off our discovery project Artificial Intelligence in Reality (AIR) first by doing a review of what is being applied across England, then bringing together an international roundtable of AI experts from academia, industry and practice to discuss it’s potential, challenges and ethical implications.

This has informed our direction, especially how we can utilise what is here and now, and we aim to build on our findings in 2025/26.

New Chief Nursing Officer for England

2024 also saw Duncan Burton become the new Chief Nursing Officer for England. The CNIO team are looking forward to seeing what happens during his tenure, and are ready to help inform CNO direction and priorities to make digital and data mainstream across the profession.

Find out more

It's been really positive to see the continued passion and growth towards nurse and midwife involvement in digital and data, we look forward to continue strengthen this bond, and keep championing this agenda in 2025.

Digital Nursing Community - FutureNHS Collaboration Platform

Welcome to our DML Community - FutureNHS Collaboration Platform