Membership Benefits
Joining the Faculty of Clinical Informatics gives you access to the following benefits:
- Networking and support from an expert group of multidisciplinary informaticians across the four nations of the UK
- Monthly e-newsletter with updates on the Faculty, blogs and interviews with members
- Special Interest Groups – be part of a network for specific areas of informatics and collaborate with experts in the field. Current Special Interest Groups include Early Careers, Artificial Intelligence, Diagnosis Recording, and Clinical Safety
- Professional Interest Groups for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. Healthcare sciences is currently being established.
- Access to Faculty events, including:
- Our Annual Membership Conference, free of charge, on a first come first serve basis per venue limits
- Significant discount for the FCI Annual Scientific Conference
- Career development support for clinical informaticians at every career stage, including:
- Mentorship scheme to connect members with senior Faculty members as advisors
- Guidance and support for appraisal and revalidation processes
- Professional accreditation of clinical informatics training courses
- Affiliation with BMJ Health and Care Informatics, with discounts on accepted publication charges
- Networking for Associate members
- Support the development of professional standards in clinical informatics, including our core competency framework for clinical informaticians to help ensure that individuals and their employers are clear about the skills and experience required for clinical informatics roles
- Certificate of membership
- Access to the members area at our offices in the Royal College of Pathologists, London
- Eligible to use the Faculty postnominal (Members and Fellows only)
- Join Standing Committees including Membership, Education and Standards and Governance to help shape Faculty policies (Fellows and Members only)
- Eligible to vote in elections of Faculty Council (Fellows and Members only)
- Guidance on the commissioning, design, development and delivery of health and care information systems
I believe that the Faculty presents a great opportunity to benefit all regulated professionals for health and social care. As the Faculty develops, I can see the possibility of highlighting, supporting and encouraging membership from the wider nursing and midwifery professions and the chance to learn from each other. This is a huge opportunity for all nurses and midwives with obvious benefits.
As the Faculty matures…it will enable those healthcare professionals already working in informatics roles to identify that they are actually part of a distinct and supported profession and not just, ‘working with technology’. The continued development of professional standards and accreditations will help to define clear career pathways for those interested in informatics, and for those who have already started the journey.
If social care is to be taken seriously it needs to have clinicians who back that up with credentials, therefore joining the Faculty was a way of: a) taking a career in informatics seriously, and b) assuring a sense of kudos as a clinician in social care. There are a lot of wise heads within the Faculty and by joining the community I am better off for it. Our jobs can be challenging at times so a sense of collaboration and learning from others is vital to aid longevity in the job.
FCI is an excellent platform and good starting point for raising the profile and mainstreaming clinical informatics within NHS and beyond. I was keen to join the Faculty and interact with other like-minded colleagues for achieving its key objectives i.e. to develop professional competencies for clinical informaticians and to provide accreditation for informatics-based training programmes.