One of four national Innovation Centres, the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) is a world-leading collaboration between the University of Strathclyde and Glasgow School of Art, publicly funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) and the Scottish Government.
Background
In 2021, the DHI conducted a comprehensive review of Scottish higher and further education (HE/FE) offerings relevant to the digital transformation of health and care. This review was carried out by Dr Sanna Rimpiläinen and took approximately 2 months to complete.
The review revealed a significant gap between educational provision and the digital competencies required by the sector. With only 1% of health and care courses explicitly addressing digital health, and minimal interdisciplinary integration across ICT, design, and leadership, the findings highlighted an urgent need for curriculum innovation.
Given the rapid evolution of both the education sector and digital health technologies, this project seeks to refresh and expand the 2021 review, providing an up-to-date evidence base to inform policy, curriculum development, and workforce planning.
Project Objectives:
- Update the course landscape
- Re-examine online prospectuses of Scottish HE and FE institutions (19 universities and 24 colleges)
- Identify and categorise current courses across:
- ICT, computing, and STEM
- Health and medicine
- Social care
- Design
- Business, leadership, and innovation
- Assess digital integration
- Evaluate the extent to which digital health and care content is embedded in course offerings
- Identify new or emerging interdisciplinary courses since 2021
- Compare with 2021 baseline
- Quantitatively and qualitatively compare 2025 findings with the 2021 review
- Highlight trends, improvements, and persistent gaps
If time allows, it may be helpful for the intern to consider and identify strategic opportunities (such as recommending areas for curriculum enhancement or new educational pathways, or exploring how AI, cybersecurity, and data science can be better integrated into health and care education) but this is not an essential part of the project.
This is primarily a desk-based research job, with potentially some stakeholder consultation activity to validate the secondary research and analysis.
If time allows, the intern will have the opportunity to write an article or a publication with the support of the supervisory team based on this study.
