On Monday 9 March 2009, the Channel 4 Dispatches programme broadcast How They Squander Our Billions, a documentary on government projects including the NHS’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The NPfIT had an initial announced cost of £2.3bn which rose to £6.2bn and later £12.7bn. A key objective of the NPfIT is the introduction of something known within the NHS as the Spine which is part of the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS). Check out the NHS Connecting for Health Spine Factsheet which includes the following information:
What is the Spine?
The Spine is part of the NHS Care Records Service, which is creating an electronic care record for all England’s 50 million plus patients.
Each patient’s electronic NHS Care Record comprises full local records, held on computer where treatment is provided (such as the GP surgery or hospital) and a summary record of important details both demographic (eg: name, address) and medical (eg, allergies, medication, test results) held on the Spine.
The Spine is a national, central database where summary patient records are stored. When fully implemented, local records will automatically upload important information to the summary patient record on the Spine.
Why have a Spine?
Once the NHS Care Records Service is fully implemented, having each patient’s summary record stored on the Spine will mean that wherever and whenever a patient seeks care from the NHS in England, those treating them will have secure access to summary information to assist with diagnosis and care. The summary record will also point clinicians to where full local records are held. This should provide safer, more joined up care.
What will the Spine do?
The Spine will:
• store personal characteristics of patients, such as demographic information
• store summarised clinical information which may be important for the patient’s future treatment and care, such as allergies, visits to A&E and adverse reactions to drugs
• ensure the security of systems required to restrict access to the national and local systems
• provide a secondary uses service, using anonymised data for business reports and statistics for research and planning purposes
• interface with all the local IT systems within the National Programme.
And so on.
Less than a year ago I attended a training course on this very system designed to ‘interface with all the local IT systems within the National Programme’ in order to provide ‘safer, more joined up care’. Well, it all sounds lovely and efficient, except that I have worked enough years and in enough different departments of the NHS to know that trying to get the countless and different in-house IT systems already in use within the country’s hospitals, clinics and surgeries to ‘interface’ in the way described above remains a very long way off.
Which is why I was entirely unsurprised last Autumn that my mother’s cancer care was interrupted for 6 weeks while her paper records were transferred from one NHS Trust to a second NHS Trust, via a central records depot in a third NHS Trust, before her details could be entered onto the second NHS Trust’s local IT systems and management of her disease could be recommenced at her new address.
If there’s a better example of how easily the NPfIT is providing this safer and more joined up care after 6 years and so many billions of pounds, I’d like to see it.
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Excuse my ignorance, couldn’t the medical staff treating your mother just ring up her GP’s surgery and ask for any information they needed?
Abominable! I despair for anything and anybody to do with the NHS these days.
The good thing about private health care is that they are so far up their own and each others arses that you are generally guaranteed a better deal ………….. and they have ‘ways’ of speeding things up when records go missing to ensure they cannot be accused of inefficiency.
On the other hand ……….. the NHS always blames it on a different department, on computers and ………….. the poor patient.
Of course it is always the poor patient who loses out.
They also know that these databases are unmanageable.
What really disturbs me is that there are many people employed by GP surgeries ………….. sometimes on a part-time basis – who have no intention of making a career in health ………….. Yet they have access to all kinds of information.
I have reported four people in the past 8 years for the dissemination of information regarding patients. I have threatened many others.
Loose talk costs not just lives but livelihoods. Casually mentioning that somebody enjoys a drink according to their medical records cost a poor woman her job last year. She lost her home and her husband.
I had the pleasure of having an arthroscopy performed on me only a couple of months ago. I had waited for the best part of a year, despite govt statistics, from the day I limped into my GPs office having a tear in the medial menisal cartilege, despite the consultant saying he didn’t see any damage, up to the day of surgery.
On leaving I was advised to seek out some physiotherapy. So I did. I was greeted by what I thought was a trained physiotherapist – no, one who claimed he was more than trained, he was expert. Without asking me or looking at my notes or even my computerised records all held on the NHS Mark I Fully Automatic Non-Refundable IT Model with a Silver Top But Easily Loseable on Trains Computer, he knew what my problem was!! Excellent, I thought as he proceeded to tell me it wasn’t my left knee, the one with the tear, oh, come on, keep up, no, it was my right ankle that was the problem!! As you can imagine, I was stunned by the profundity of his argument. Without propting he asked me my name – presumably just to check – No, I will not hear a bad word about our wonderful NHS and its psychic staff, their record keeping is second to none and the computer is just magic…..I speak as a trained Haematologist of many years standing and some sitting down (but not anymore).
haven’t been able to correct one or two typographical errors, sorry, didn’t want to retype it as it’s been going on for ever as it is…..:0)
“Couldn’t the medical staff treating your mother just ring up her GP’s surgery and ask for any information they needed?”
You would think, wouldn’t you? You would also think that letting her GP know in advance of her move the details of her new GP and surgery would also have done the trick. Wrong. You can speak to receptionists till you are blue in the face trying to speed up the transfer but it makes no difference. My point is that this marvellous new Spine thing has been under development for 6 years at a cost of billions (what else, these days?) and although it is keeping all the professional think-tankers nice and busy with their brainstorming sessions, their training initiatives, their public relations, their travel expenses and their ongoing development, it isn’t even close to doing what it is supposed to do and therefore it is as good as useless.
Oh stop whining. Write a threatening letter or two explaining what happened and point your aggrieved finger. Stab it into an NHS chest or two; aim it at an NHS personnel’s forehead and make squawky threatening noises to the tune of “You lot are useless; what about that brilliant new billion-pound computer system you’re supposed to be using every day? Why isn’t that working properly?” Let me know how it goes. Good luck.
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