What is Health Informatics in the NHS?
Many think of Informatics as purely IT and although this is a part of the Health Informatics umbrella Informatics is a large and diverse mixture of disciplines, covering, for example:
Health Records , ICT, Information Governance, Clinical Coding, Information/Business Analysis, Help Desks, Switchboard and Administrative and Management roles. Some have direct patient contact others do not.
How do these affect patient care?
From ensuring Health Records are available and up to date, in the right place at the right time for clinicians, making sure the hundreds of IT systems are working and fit for purpose, safeguarding personal data and making sure of its appropriate use, coding of patient’s treatment activity to ensure correct funding is received for procedures undertaken, analysing data and sharing with clinicians to enable the best outcome for patients, the most suitable use of resources and identifying anomalies, to speaking with patients and users over the telephone – giving advice and help (the switchboard is sometimes the first contact a user has with an organisation and first impressions count), making sure departments are run efficiently and to the best standard, all have a tremendously important role to play within an NHS organisation. They are a cog in the wheel that makes up the NHS and without them the wheel will not turn.
The scheme is open for any undergraduate student looking to undertake a placement year as part of their degree, for example, degrees in Health Informatics or Business Analytics. Placements start in summer 2021 and finish the following summer. During your year in the NHS you will be offered plenty of opportunities to put theory into practice and attend development events.
After graduation, many placement students come back to the NHS or apply for our highly regarded Graduate Scheme.
