Report highlights NPfIT's 'impressive milestones'

Tags: efficiency Infrastructure London NPfIT South

30 Aug 2007

‘Impressive milestones in the implementation of the National Programme for IT’ have been highlighted as one of the major achievements in the NHS in the first quarter of 2007/08, in a report published today.

The IT programme is one of a number of key issues pulled out and focused upon to demonstrate good progress made in 2007/08 to date, helping to boost good financial management by trusts.

The NHS quarterly report says: “The first quarter of this year also saw some impressive milestones in the implementation of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). NPfIT continues to make significant progress in providing robust and speedy infrastructure and systems to enable the NHS locally to be ever more responsive to providing better care for the patients they serve.”

Milestones reached in the first quarter of the financial year are:

• 100% of Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) installations were completed in the South and London – and a total of 81,733,354 images were stored during this period

• Between April and June, eight acute Patient Administration Systems were deployed in hospitals across the country, while over one million appointments were made using Choose and Book

• The Electronic Prescription Service continued to grow in popularity, with 9,145,435 prescriptions transmitted using the system in the quarter – equating to 11% of daily prescriptions.

The report also says that the decentralisation process for the NPfIT local ownership programme (NLOP) has now begun and will help to further progress in the programme.

Elsewhere in the report, delivery towards key targets on waiting times, tackling infection and health inequalities are demonstrated.

Figures for the first quarter are also published, showing that subject to fluctuation over the rest of the financial year, the NHS is forecasting a surplus of £983m at the end of 2007/08 compared to the end of year position of £510m surplus in 2006/07 and a deficit of £547m in 2005/06.

Health secretary Alan Johnson said: “Today's financial forecasts show the NHS is now on a sustainable financial footing. The NHS is becoming more efficient [at] freeing up resources to be spent on the major concerns of patients like tackling hospital bugs and improving access to local doctors. These figures show that any changes to NHS services are driven by the need to save lives, not money.”

David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, added: “Local NHS staff have successfully turned the position around from one of overall deficit to a forecast surplus, created through increased efficiency and productivity and through greater financial discipline and rigour in the system.

“As I set out in my annual report, an organisation the size of the NHS should always plan for a surplus. This is good management, but more importantly it's good for patients. A surplus allows flexibility and headroom for organisations to plan for the long term, invest in new services before closing existing ones, and respond to unexpected in-year pressures such as new drugs.”

Links

‘The Quarter’ report

Reader's Comments

Millstones, statistics and damn lies

30 Aug 07 16:08

How many users did these PAS systems have, (ref your Some NPfIT PAS Systems barely used) and how many PAS systems were supposed to have been implemented by now. The concept of a PAS was not new, in fact in our thinking, we were questioning the value of having one at all any more.

Universal scheduling, a good clinical system, and Data Warehouse/ Data mining might have been far more efficient than these dinosaur systems.

Flexibility is non existent or very expensive with LSP PACS, again our thinking before being forced to take this was of universal image and multimedia storage, including medical imaging, Cardiology, and gathering various other emerging high data requirements. NPfIT has made this so much harder to do.

And with Electronic Prescriptions, the case is way overstated. For the South by August 2007, 4.7 million barcodes have been printed on scripts at GP practices (ever), yet only 64,000 were made use of by community pharmacists. So 97.3% were retyped the old fashioned way.

Milestones or millstones?

31 Aug 07 09:08

" 100% of Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) installations were completed in the South and London – and a total of 81,733,354 images were stored during this period."

Doubtless this helps to explain why, over the last three months, the average time it takes for me to receive X-ray reports has increased from 10 days to 42 days. I would call that more a millstone than a milestone.

An Impressive Milestone? not from where I'm sitting

31 Aug 07 10:08

It never ceases to amaze me when I'm given information that is at such wide variance with the truth. The "impressive milestones" include a PACS system that cannot send radiology results electronically, so the results have to be printed out, sent, received, scanned and filed. and a PAS system that has been condemned by clerical staff ( who are tearing their hair out ), patients and doctors. The letters to GPs from the trust IT department and the chief executive ( backed up by an interview in the local paper ) are rather better evidence of how the PAS is bedding in. And I can't understand why my surgery received 29 letters in one day, in 29 separate envelopes, each bearing a royal mail stamp, to tell me that a patient is to be seen in XXXX speciality clinic. We only get 2 deliveries per day via internal post.

A spot of reality testing

31 Aug 07 13:08

It's easy to make an impression on the impressionable! But you really do have to wonder whether the people at CfH (and their political masters) actually believe that these milestones are as significant as the report claims. If they do, then the mismatch between the perceptions of the programme and those of the service would suggest a real management problem which does not augur well for the future of NHS IT.

The point has been made sevceral times

04 Sep 07 10:09

All of these 'milestones' did not need a national programme for IT nor a huge monster of administration to tell us what we already knew. In fact a sound arguement can be put forward that the national programme has actually slowed down modernisation of NHS IT infrastructure. How many more PAS systems would have been modernised if the local Trusts had been given specific targetted funding and left to implement a system that they define and they need (my apporach wouldnt be as radical as your first post but hey if thats what they think is best for them and thier patients then let them do it). Imagine the thousands of hours of effort saved by avoiding the need to attend endless meetings to describe yet again why CSC/ISoft arnt going to deliver Lorenzo on time.

PACS didnt need a central managed approach, everyone wanted one it was a no brainer. Yes the spine is good and would have requried a small central team to deliver a national solution. As the team would have a limited scope and a clear targetted brief they would have probably deliverd a better system more quickly than the emerging monolith which still provides almost nothing to almost nobody. As for installing a few PAS systems, the NHS has been doing that for years, without the stifeled screams of users associated with NPfIT deployments.

Its the centralised model and the reliance on huge suppliers that is fundamentally wrong. A standards and catalogue based approach would have done the same thing, more quickly and with a lot less damage. That would allow Trusts, to implement systems at the pace they could afford and to reject systems which are evidently not fit for purpose and encourage an NHS development market which has been laid waste too.

Until we have a complete rethink and a change of course we will continue to pretend the Emporer is fully clothed.