“The NHS has quite an expensive IT system that, frankly, is not essential for the front line”
Welcome to the Ascensus Blog.
I’ve been meaning to start this for a while, but have been lacking a really nice headline to open with, but luckily the Chancellor has been busy over the weekend and done the hard work for me.
This quote really, genuinely intrigues me. I should explain that I am not a clinician of any kind, though I obviously come into contact with clinicians every day. Our company has been running for 5 years now designing healthcare technologies for clinicians so I would like to think that we are at least slightly informed on how IT and healthcare work together.
To suggest that this IT system is not essential for the front line of the delivery of medicine is to betray a complete lack of understanding of the objectives of the project. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the project has been badly run, badly managed and exceptionally poorly specified from the outset, but to attempt to write it off by suggesting that it is ‘not essential for the front line’ whilst completely failing to show any sense of awareness of the the root cause of the problems besieging this project absolutely astounds me.
First off, let me quote one small fact:
According to the NPDA report ‘Safety in doses’, the total cost of avoidable harms in medicine annually comes to £1.2bn including a £769 cost of avoidable hospital admissions due to ADR.
I am a firm believer that technology has its place in life and should never take the place of sound judgement, but it does seem to me that if £1.2bn is spent annually in correcting issues of medication, then there must be a reasonable case to be made that systems which can address these issues should be implemented wherever possible – be it in tracking interactions, medication history, correct dosages both at prescription and dispensing phases (particularly in hospitals with drip bags all full of clear liquid) or any of the other seemingly innocuous tasks performed, all of which carry potentially lethal consequences if done in error.
I don’t believe that any clinician will disagree that it is simply impossible to keep track of every single medication and interaction and that a significant majority of them will have been awoken in the middle of the night by worries about medication they may or may not have prescribed that day, particularly as a junior doctor. Even the BMA describe the project as ‘an essential tool for clinicians, doctors and other staff to be able to treat patients’.
Over the next few days, I will be posting 3 further short articles on technology and its uses in healthcare and why Mr Darling’s statement could not be more wrong.
