Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

Full background here:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

An Epic electronic health record system costing £200 million was installed at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in October 2014, the first installation of an Epic system in the UK.[21][22]

After 2.1 million records were transferred to it, it developed serious problems and the system became unstable.[23] Ambulances were diverted to other hospitals for five hours and hospital consultants noted issues with blood transfusion and pathology services.[24] Other problems included delays to emergency care and appointments, and problems with discharge letters, clinical letters and pathology test results.[22] Chief information officer, Afzal Chaudhry, said "well over 90% of implementation proceeded successfully".[21]

In July 2015, the BBC reported that the hospital's finances were being investigated.[25] In September 2015, both the CEO and CFO of the hospital resigned.[26] Problems with the clinical-records system, which were said to have compromised the "ability to report, highlight and take action on data" and to prescribe medication properly, were held to be contributory factors in the organisation's sudden failure.[27] In February 2016, digitalhealth.net reported that Clare Marx, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and member of the NHS National Information Board, found that at the time of implementation, "staff, patients and management rapidly and catastrophically lost confidence in the system. That took months and a huge amount of effort to rebuild."

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

Puddle

The issues with the NHS and IT systems go back some years, way before 2014.

The problems stemmed from the idiocy of the Government at the time who, having no clue about computing decided the best way to procure an IT framework that would serve the whole of the country, was to award the IT contract to 7 separate IT providers !

As an IT expert who had exposure to that, I was simply amazed at that crazy decision. It meant you had 7 IT systems providers/developers of differeing sizes and expertise levels. It meant that you were asking 7 separate firms, who each would want to develop systems in their own ways, to their own high standards, to somehow come up with a range of NHS software solutions that would in the end, somehow, magically all be able to gel together, transfer data between them seamlessly and provide one core framework of systems as if they had been developed by one single supplier.

It was just utter madness and quite predictably didn't work in the slightest. The levels of systems and data analysis needed to assess existing bureacratic NHS processes, paperwork, staff practices etc was massive and each of the 7 companies would do differing levels of that analysis dependng on their expertise and available resources.

As time went by, and deadlines were missed, and the whole thing was realised to be rather stupid, some of the 7 dropped out and the contracts were renegotiated with the larger of those that remained.

Finally then good progress was able to be made with the full range of solutions.

At the time I just looked at the whole situation as a typical government incompetant mess. Looking back now I wonder whether it was just a typical way to find ways of syphoning off government money into black holes and bags marked "expenses" and the like! Create a mess, one that will go on for many years to provide lots of time to rinse all those £millions through the various processes to syphon off the money. Perhaps I am too cynical !

In the end, getting government bureaucrats involved in the procurement of IT systems and the terms of the contracts involved, is just plain folly. These people haven't the slightest idea what systems and data analysis is or systems integration or data migration. They are too worried about being ripped off by cowboy IT providers and so generate contracts that are unworkable. What they of course need, is a set of good IT experts within the government itself. Hey ho.

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

My daughter was a ward sister ( since moved on to other position) and between her and others I'd say I know a fair few people from nurses to consultants and most say when you actually boil down the NHS to its bare essentials that given 'x' amount of ££££budget v fit for purpose ( what one really needs) it's a simple case of too many overpaid managers ..... as if to prove the fact consider whenever there is either war or natural disaster what do 'the people' scream for ? Doctors ? Nurses? ..... as they make a difference ,not once has anyone called 999 and requested a plane load of managers !
Visit any hospital at the weekend and you will see empty car parks ... I noticed this years ago and remarked on it to be told 'of course it's empty ...it's the weekend and no managers are in' ...... a little story told in jest but the sentiment is real ....

The NHS entered a raft race , 10 crew members per team.... so the NHS decided their best strategy was to manage the 'raft' and so 9 managers were duly appointed to plan the trip down the river and one nurse was chosen to paddle ..... they finished last so a meeting was held and after many lunches and presentations it was decided for next year the best solution was to increase the budget and due to the nurse struggling to paddle on her own that she should be replaced with another manager to oversee the the other other 9 managers ........

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

Slightly off topic but worth adding I think .

I heard on the news this week £300 million was lost last year as overseas tourists used the NHS and we're never charged or paid for their treatment . Apparantly the charges were not followed up .

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

There seems to have been many reasons and if we put them altogether, it becomes a massive amount of waste and error which both cost financially.

We seem to have short memories at times.

We know labours PFI deals have cost as per :


Can't copy and paste the http/ it's frozen. This is the report by Telegraph.
June 2012.

Yesterday afternoon, the Queen opened the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen. She will doubtless have been impressed: the facility, the first to be built in Northern Ireland for more than a decade, is a gleaming shrine to 21st-century healthcare. What may not have been mentioned, however, was that the £276 million hospital was constructed not with public funds, but by a consortium under the Private Finance Initiative – and that the deal to build it included a 30-year “facilities management” contract for one of the firms involved.


The Enniskillen deal may be a shining example of value for money. But many PFI contracts are not. Ministers are on the verge of taking over the South London Healthcare Trust, after it proved unable to cope with a bill of more than £60 million a year in interest alone. One of the trust’s three hospitals, the Princess Royal in Bromley, took £118 million to build, yet will cost roughly £1.2 billion. All told, Labour signed 103 PFI deals for the NHS, at a value of £11.4 billion and an eventual price of more than £65 billion. The diversion of that money away from patient care will put inexorable pressure on budgets, to the point where some hospitals will crack under the strain.


PFI, in short, is not merely about £22 light bulbs and £875 Christmas trees – it is about budgetary incompetence on a monumental scale. And it comes as little surprise that it can be traced back to Gordon Brown, who turbo-charged the Tories’ fledgling public-private partnerships in order to buy schools, hospitals and more on the never-never. This allowed him first to evade spending restrictions, and later to splurge on public-sector salaries; in the mean time, the credit card bills got higher and higher.


Many PFI deals delivered what was promised – but where things have gone wrong, as in Bromley, the contracts were often drawn up so poorly that there is little the Coalition can do. Ministers have renegotiated some deals to claw back costs, and should make every effort, and twist every arm, to do more. They should also remind voters of the ignominious parts played in this debacle by Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls. But, above all, they need urgently to produce a way of funding infrastructure that draws on the private sector’s strengths rather than exploiting the public sector’s weaknesses. Jesse Norman, the Tory MP who has led the way in exposing PFI’s flaws, points out that the state must spend more than £200 billion on new infrastructure over the coming decade, and cannot do so without private help. The Treasury is beavering away on a new model of funding. If it repeats the errors made by Labour, the cost to the nation will be heavy indeed.

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

Also too many new houses being built without increasing local services.

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

The whole set up of the NHS's computing system is a joke to me.


To make it quick I suffer with alpha1zz severe emphysema I also have left ventriculor disfunction. The first being a genetic disorder the second caused mainly by the first.
Anyways I see a doctor in the Royal Brompton and a COPD nurse in my area and a Heart Failure nurse in my area and of course my own gp.
Yet when I visit anyone of them I have to tell them who I have been to see before and why, and what they said or prescribed me.
Quite simply these seperate visits are put on my computer records but for some apparent reason they are never connected together they all work seperately an that is how they are on the NHS computers.
What a total waste of time and money, and a big bloody joke imo.

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

I have never understood that either. Surely they should be able to type in your National Insurance number and all your details would appear

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

Same here.
My GP surgery recently introduced a system whereby, if you complete reams of paperwork, you can access your medical records.
Having done so, I find that I can access my records at my GP's, but as for the hospital in the nearby city - nothing.

Re: Could this be the reason for NHS failures?

About 3 years ago, my daughter was taking a job abroad and needed her medical record. She went to her GP reception and asked if she was able to have them. Yes, no problem, £50.00 please , but as she had an operation done privately, she was told she could get them printed off for free at the hospital where she attended !