Executives at a hospital that pioneered systems under
the £12.4bn National Programme for IT in the NHS have blamed their
new technology for contributing to the trust's loss of status as
top performing health service site.
The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford was last year awarded
the maximum three-star rating for its performance. Under a new
method of rating hospitals, Nuffield was categorised by the
Healthcare Commission as "weak" for quality of service. This is the
bottom category of performance.
The ratings matter because hospitals can lose business - and
income - if their ratings remain poor and patients are referred
elsewhere.
On a target for seeing patients with suspected cancer, Nuffield
incurred a "fail" because it was unable to submit the necessary
data during the implementation of its new systems.
It also failed to meet national targets on the number of
patients waiting more than six months and on the number of
cancelled operations.
Jan Fowler, acting chief executive at Nuffield, said she was
disappointed at the "weak" rating.
"We believe we are providing a good quality service to our
patients at this hospital but the results have been distorted by
the computer problems we had earlier this year following the
installation of our new patient administration computer system,
which unfortunately caused some patients to experience delays to
their treatment," she said.
"The hospital is now running on the new computer system, but in
the first few months of implementation we did experience
significant teething problems.
"We were the first hospital in the southern region to take on
this new software and, even though we took what we thought were
robust contingency measures in case there were problems, the
difficulties took longer to resolve than anyone could have
anticipated."
The installation by Fujitsu and Cerna of the Care Records
Service at Nuffield led to some operations being cancelled and a
failure to produce accurate, or in some cases any, information on
patient appointments.
A spokeswoman for Nuffield said the software was performing
better now, but she declined to answer Computer Weekly's questions
on what shortcomings still exist.
More information
www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk
www.noc.nhs.uk