Retention of clinical bioinformaticians in the NHS project launched

HEE’s Digital Readiness Programme and the National School of Healthcare Science (NSHCS) have commissioned a project to look at the retention of clinical bioinformaticians. We decided to look into this after several people reported to us about the risk of a potential brain drain of talent of this critical workforce to sectors outside of the NHS. These anecdotes were mostly communicated to us during a couple of workshops last summer to inform our programme’s digital workforce planning. Therefore, we’ve decided to take a deeper dive into this to review what the retention issues are and review the commissioning model to enable opportunities for improvement in retention.

We have commissioned Enera Consulting to support this work. The project is being undertaken in two phases:

• Phase One – a retention study
• Phase Two – a review of the commissioning model based on findings of the retention study, to be commissioned later in the year

Get involved with the project

We need current STP trainees or current STP training officers on our bioinformatics programme to help us with this project by participating in an interview in the next 4 – 6 weeks. If you are able to take part in an interview please contact katie.foster@hee.nhs.uk. We really hope you can help us with this important work.