More cash for ‘paperless NHS’
pharmafile | September 5, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | DoH, Hunt, NHS, paper free
The government has announced £1 billion funding for IT projects to help deliver its commitment to a paperless NHS by 2018.
The figure is not quite what it seems: it includes £260 million from the government that has already been announced, which means that only £240 million is new money from the Department of Health.
Local health and care systems will come up with the other £500 million themselves, matching the DoH’s commitment.
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt used the announcement to put the boot into previous Labour administrations. “The public are rightly sceptical about NHS IT after the disastrous waste that happened in the past,” he said.
“But we can’t let their failure hold patients back from seeing the benefits of the technology revolution that is transforming daily lives.”
Conscious of the fall-out from various failed large-scale public IT projects, Hunt has said things will be driven from the bottom-up.
“Rather than imposing a clunky one size fits all approach from Whitehall, this fund will empower local clinicians and health services to come together and find innovative solutions for their patients,” he went on.
According to the government’s own ten-year information strategy, patients will be able to view their GP record online by 2015, and the DoH released an ambitious strategy on information sharing in December last year.
Everyone should also be able to book GP appointments and order repeat prescriptions online in two years’ time, although the government is emphasising that IT improvements will also give medical professionals the ability to share patient information.
Doctors, nurses and social care professionals providing emergency care will be able to access patients’ details “routinely across the country for the first time, so will be able to give them personal and effective treatment with full knowledge of their medical and care history”, the DoH said in a statement.
More time seeing patients, less time filling in paperwork, fewer errors in prescriptions – these are among the key benefits that the government says the money will bring, with A&E departments being one of the main areas where improvements will be seen.
“It is deeply frustrating to hear stories of elderly dementia patients turning up at A&E with no one able to access their medical history, and for their sakes as well as all NHS users we need to put this right,” Hunt added.
Patients should be less likely to undergo unnecessary diagnostic tests or be admitted to hospital overnight, the government says – the latter in particular is of great significance as the NHS faces massive cost cuts and, with an ageing population, greater demand on its services.
In February, Hunt put his head on the block by pledging that ‘one region in England’ will have a fully portable electronic health record in place by the next general election.
Adam Hill
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