Abstract:

Introduction:
One of main objectives for the health care professionals is to empower the patients, offering them the best high quality health related information. For this, is essential to have a good understanding of available resources and the proper tools to manage them.
In the last decade, the use of technology in the health environment has increased vertiginously, with thousands of resources, tools and apps. Internet gives nurses and doctors multiple possibilities to create own resources for the patients’ empowerment.
Our goal is, on the one hand, to measure the use and management of the internet and its tools by health professionals and assess whether these skills are applied for the patients’ benefit. We also intend to detect deficiencies or areas for improvement in the training of doctors and nurses in the digital environment as well as propose strategies for their implementation.

Materials and methods:
Experts Panel
In order to analyse the current situation of knowledge, competencies and skills in the use of digital tools among health professionals, a questionnaire with initially 26 queries, mostly open-ended, has been submitted for review, analysis and discussion by a panel of experts composed of thirteen renowned researchers, disseminators and professionals directly related to this field of study. After that, the questionnaire was reduced to 24 questions.
Questionnaire conducted by health professionals
This questionnaire, prepared using Google Drive form in order to facilitate autocomplete and send responses, was validated by an ethical committee before dissemination. The questionnaire was sent by email to the members of two health organizations, nurses and doctors from the Valencia region from Dec’18 to Feb’19, after obtaining authorization from these institutions.

Results:
103 replies were obtained: 58% doctors, 38% nurses and 4% others. More than 87% develop their professional activity in the public sector and 61% work in primary health care. 8% of these professionals have no Internet access in their consulting room.
82,5% stated that social networks are useful to keep them updated. Most useful social networks for them are YouTube and Twitter.
18% don’t use any tool to appraise the patient empowerment. 78,6% think patients don’t use digital tools due to lack of education whereas 53,4% consider that the problem is associated with the lack of competencies from the health care professionals.

Conclusions:
Although many professionals consider YouTube a very useful tool for their own learning, it is hardly used to train patients. The material most used in clinical practice remains the printed information. However, more than half of the patients, according to the professionals themselves, could access the internet to learn more about their disease.
Although a large part of the respondents say they have good technology management, more than half say they need more training to adopt digital tools in their daily practice.

Proposals for improvement:
In order to offer better training for professionals, the MUST digital skills for a healthcare professional must were analysed. These competences are: information management, effective communication, cooperative networks, resources creation, digital reputation management, etc.
To consolidate them, a pilot training project will be prepared to be carried out in different teams of primary care nurses.

Keywords:

Health care professionals, digital skills, training.