Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that mental health training programs equip future clinicians with the necessary digital literacy skills to support the integration of technology into mental health care.

The NHS Digital Academy has a responsibility to support the National Health Service workforce to develop the necessary digital skills for work. The NHS Digital Academy is responsible for a strategy that will help NHS employers to support and upskill these staff through self-assessment, and both online and more traditional face-to-face learning opportunities. 16,000 people in the NHS workforce have undertaken self-assessment tools, as part of its testing stage.

Some clinical education programmes already include digital skills development, and NHS England is exploring how digital capabilities can be more comprehensively developed through existing clinical education programmes, including in mental health.