About this site

This website contains the Skills for Health National Occupational Standards for Health Informatics. Skills for Health was established in April 2002 with support from the four UK health departments, the independent and voluntary health sectors and staff organisations to become the Sector Skills Council for Health across the UK.

National Occupational Standards describe good practice in the workplace in terms of what individuals need to be able to do, as well as what they need to know and understand. The National Occupational Standards for Health Informatics are relevant to the following groups of staff within the health sector:

• Knowledge Management Staff
• Information Management Staff
• Health Informatics Senior Managers and Directors of Services
• Clinical Informatics Staff
• Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Staff
• Health Records Staff

The Health Informatics National Occupational Standards were developed through extensive consultation with practitioners and key stakeholders across the UK. The National Occupational Standards are made up of a total of 141 competences.

Accessing the competences

There are a number of ways to access these competences from the Home page. These are discussed below.

1. Click on each of the individual areas that make up the Health Informatics National Occupational Standards (e.g Health Informatics specific, Skills for Health (GEN) etc).
2. If you know the code of a specific competence you want to look at, click on National Occupational Standards at a glance. The codes of the individual competences for each area of the Health Informatics National Occupational Standards are presented and individual titles can be seen when the mouse is dragged over the relevant competence. Users with Javascript enabled browsers can make use of a filter on this page to hide or show the different areas that make up the Health Informatics National Occupational Stanadards suite.
3. Click on Subject index, and follow the links to the competences that are relevant to a health informatics subject in which you have an interest (e.g. procurement). This interface with the competences is based on the subjects that were discussed during the development project.

The navigation bar at the top of the site includes a 'keyword' search facility. This facility will search the entire content of the standards for keywords or phrases.

Links to the Knowledge and Skills Framework

Each of the individual competences are linked to the Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF). This information is included on the cover page of many of the competences. In addition, if you would like to see how all of the competences fit into the KSF, a useful table is also included on the site. Simply click on Links to the Knowledge and Skills Framework (doc) from the home page to access this information.

Using National Occupational Standards

This site includes a number of Templates for using the National Occupational Standards. These are provided as examples of how the competences can be used. The templates cover the following applications:

• Development needs analysis
• Job specifications
• Performance improvement
• Role profiles
• Team - identifying team and individual contributions

It should be noted that the National Occupational Standards can be used for a wide variety of HRD purposes and the templates only apply to a few of these. The templates are included for illustrative purposes and can be altered or adapted according to local needs.

Accessibility

This site is intended to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Users with sight problems can increase the text size used in the content of the pages in two ways:

1. By using your browser's viewing options to increase, decrease or magnify the text size.
2. If your browser supports and has Javascript enabled, you can use the 'Text-size' option at the top of this site. If cookies are enabled the text size setting will also be remembered upon your next visit.

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