The NHS’s future is digital readiness. Who’s responsible for building it?

The 10 Year Plan, the ambition, and what it doesn't say

In July 2025, the UK Government set out an ambitious 10-year roadmap to reinvent the NHS with a new model of care. Alongside "Hospital-to-Community" and "Sickness-to-Prevention", the plan outlines an ambitious and much-needed "analogue to digital" shift within the NHS to elevate its technological capabilities into 21st century leadership. EPRs are recognised as a critical technological infrastructure within the plan which sets out deeper integrations such as Single Patient Records and AI.

Writing for the Health Foundation in July 2025, Dr Malte Gerhold — Director of Innovation and Improvement at the Health Foundation and a member of the key group leading strategy on data and technology for the 10 Year Plan — argued that the plan "focuses more on the technology itself, rather than the underlying change it is enabling, or what needs to 'sit around' the technology to achieve this." He noted it does not spell out "how services and pathways will need to be redesigned, how professional roles and ways of working will need to evolve, and what underpinning capabilities are required to make it all work."

Having EPRs and deploying them with competence are not the same

Following £1.9bn in investment from NHS England's Frontline Digitisation Programme, 95% of trusts are expected to achieve baseline digital capacity by implementing or upgrading EPRs by early 2026. But physically having the systems does not equal competent and confident use of their capabilities. The first year of NHS England's Digital Maturity Assessment found that while 90% of trusts have an EPR in place, only 10–30% are using more advanced functions such as integrated prescriptions or record sharing with other hospitals — findings cited in the Health Foundation's April 2025 analysis of EPR benefits realisation.

There is a growing evidence base reporting a significant barrier between tech coverage and competent use of it. The NHS Confederation's frontline digitisation research identifies workforce and training as among the most significant barriers to delivering on digital priorities — cited by over half of respondents in their survey. As the Health Foundation's April 2025 analysis concluded, "simply digitising paper doesn't change the way we deliver care". Meaningful use therefore requires time, investment and cultural change, as well as factoring in newly qualified clinicians into the equation.

The training gap has shifted to education — and education providers can close it

The gap between digital ambition and workforce readiness has a specific splitting point: pre-employment education. The NHS 10 Year Plan assumes external digital skills development within the education pipeline and isn't covered in the plan. This is a critical aspect for medical educators to consider in the curriculum delivered to the learners they send to placements and workforces, where navigating technologies like EPRs are a day one requirement.

The Simulated Practice Learning framework, and the tariff-funded SPL placement model, already creates a structured obligation for education providers to deliver realistic simulation; digital documentation is an increasingly expected component of that. Therefore, omitting digital EPR simulation is increasingly constituting an incomplete picture of clinical practice and an opportunity lost in terms of demonstrating SPL activity for auditing this tariff-supported facet of placement time. The alternative is staff entering working environments without prior EPR simulation exposure will require more intensive onboarding, and that time and resource cost lands somewhere.

The regulatory and funding frameworks for simulated practice learning are now well established. The Nursing and Midwifery Council has made SPL a permanent feature of pre-registration nursing education, permitting up to 600 of the required 2,300 practice learning hours to be delivered through simulation. To count toward those hours, the NMC requires scenarios to be contextualised and supervised — reflecting real practice with real patients, not isolated skills exercises. The NMC's own evaluation of SPL concluded that it "offers contextualised, authentic practice learning that allows students to practise and reflect in a safe environment, enhancing competence and supporting confidence." Separately, NHS England's Education and Training Tariff guidance for 2025 to 2026 confirms that simulation-based learning activity is funded at the clinical tariff rate, provided the hours delivered are compliant with regulatory or professional body expectations.

What a practical response to this gap looks like

SimEPR was built as a direct response to this education-working reality gap. Founder Dr Arron Thind's own experience of the steep learning curve going from paper simulation to digital practice informed his creation of the SimEPR platform.

SimEPR, and its subsequent modalities SimWard and SimClass, are dedicated EPR platforms designed to replicate the structure, logic and workflow of live clinical EPR systems in a learning environment — building the digital fluency and documentation habits that transfer to real systems, without replicating any single trust's specific configuration.

Independent peer-reviewed research — including a practice-based commentary published by Adelaide Health Simulation — has evaluated SimEPR in a clinical education context, highlighting the educational value of integrating simulated EPR systems that align with real clinical workflows. A further published study from Buckinghamshire New University examined SimEPR's use in interprofessional trauma simulation, demonstrating its role in supporting realistic digital documentation and electronic handover. While SimEPR isn't a replication of any one EPR system, the value is in building familiarity with real clinical workflow skills that can translate to live EPR systems — something Arron had to navigate alone.

From techno optimism to techno realism — what education providers can do now

The NHS's digital ambitions will depend on a workforce that arrives ready to use these systems; educators need to navigate the terrain of this journey that the destination didn't consider — the skills, role redesigns and cultural change required. Luckily, graduate digital readiness is a terrain they can directly influence within their curriculum delivery.

Considering this, we've compiled a practical framework of evaluative criteria for digital EPR tools so it is clear what questions need to be asked of them to ensure they're up to the task of training future clinical workforces, before they are implemented into institutions:

The institutions best placed to support the NHS's digital ambitions are those that treat digital readiness as a clinical competency, not an IT induction — and that shift from techno optimism to techno realism starts in simulation delivery.

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Sources and Further Reading