DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Underlining a growing need for ‘digital literacy’
Digital transformation (DT) is the process of adoption and implementation of digital technology by an organisation to create new or modify existing products, services, and operations, by translating business processes into a digital format.1
DT is not an option, it’s an inevitability. Bearing this in mind, it’s in all our interests to be prepared and
engaged in the process. The end-point we currently imagine is Artificial Intelligence (AI). This paper starts with the personal journey of Dr Nick Hill FIHEEM, director of Water Quality London, into the digital world, presents data based on a survey of healthcare estates professionals, and concludes with an opinion of where we should go from here.
At secondary school, my elder brother owned something called a ‘slide rule’ (for the younger readers of HEJ, you might have to Google that). I assumed that in due course I would also be the happy owner of such a device. Not so. In 1972, one of my classmates obtained a kit to build his own Sinclair calculator, at a cost of £56 (equivalent to £945 today). When assembled, it was capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We were all amazed. Fairly quickly, prices plummeted, and we all acquired calculators. Leaving school, off I went to become an undergraduate biological scientist. However, I recall at that time that the only computer on campus was a mainframe in the Computer Science Department, into which would venture those students that most of us considered weird, clutching punched cards which apparently were fed into this machine. People muttered words like ‘Fortran’, but all this ‘computer’ stuff formed no part of my undergraduate degree; we had paper and calculators (albeit with statistical functions).
A year without interaction with computers A year working for a water authority followed, during which time I had no interaction with computers. The next step was a Master’s Degree in Analytical Chemistry, still with no computers, but for some reason we went next door to the Royal College of Art, for a presentation on the ‘Information Superhighway’. Despite being surrounded by people with brains, this lecture went completely over our heads. We could not imagine the world being described. Rather than being excited or astounded, it was just too ‘far out’ to comprehend or believe. We couldn’t imagine it as having any relevance to our future lives. When we needed to do a literature search, we cycled to multiple libraries, not the internet. I then studied for a PhD in Public Health Engineering – during which time something that looked like a PC, but which was actually a word processor, arrived in our research section, although it was only operated by a secretary. Our ‘cut and paste’ was literally that; write on paper and edit it by cutting bits out with scissors, stick it to another sheet of paper, and – when finished – present it to the secretary for typing, the output being paper, not digital. However, when I popped out into the world of work again, I shadowed a Sales/Service engineer for a day, before being interviewed for a similar role. When I asked what he didn’t like about his job, he said ‘the admin’, which involved paperwork and dealing with information provided on large sheets of dot-matrix printed computer output. He said he got 18 months behind with his admin at one stage, and when I enquired about what he did about
it, he said he ‘chucked it all away, and no-one noticed’. The data obviously didn’t have much value. A career in consulting followed, which included serving
healthcare organisations, with my first exposure to the varying extent of ‘computerisation’. Those were the days when saving digital files was not trusted, and everything was printed out and put in the filing cabinet just in case it was lost from the computer memory. I visited an Energy Manager in a large acute hospital, and since I’d never met him before, started with some small talk. “I noticed the old computers you’re throwing out, in the supermarket trolley outside your office door,” I said, to which he replied: “Those are our new ones.” To collect emails he had to walk three quarters of a mile across the site.
The world of mobile phones By now we were in the world of mobile phones. I had an analogue phone with a car kit and a ‘booster’. It was not long before the mobile phone company kept calling me saying: “You can have a free new digital mobile phone.” To which I replied: “Great, and you’ll be fitting a new car kit for free as well, will you?” I would then be sold the benefit that my calls would now be private, to which I replied: “Who cares? I don’t mind who hears me say ‘I’m an hour from home, darling’, to which the reply is ‘I’ll put the dinner on.’ “ Eventually, we all succumbed to digital, and then smartphones. I read with dismay that children are arriving at their first school reception class unable to sit up because they have insufficient core strength, due to having stared at screens all their lives.2
March 2025 Health Estate Journal 33
Vintage calculators from the 1970s. Little could we have imagined back then the pace of technological advancement seen in the last two decades.
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