A hospital trust in Oxford which lost track of crucial
data on some patients after going live with a pioneering project
under the £12.4bn NHS IT programme was unaware that a similar
go-live at another hospital had led to a "serious untoward
incident".
This is one of the findings of a joint investigation by Computer
Weekly and Channel 4 News. The results of the investigation were
broadcast on Channel 4 yesterday evening (11 December).
In December 2005, the Oxford-based Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre
installed a Cerner patient administration system as part of the
National Programme for IT in the NHS. The go-live led to the trust
reporting a serious untoward incident to the National Patient
Safety Agency because of what the trust's executives called
"potential patient risks".
Though Nuffield later said there was no risk to the safety of
patients, the go-live led to some cancelled operations, complaints
from patients, and the loss of the trust's status as a
top-performing hospital. The incident was the subject of an
investigation by the National Audit Office.
Now the Nuffield trust says that when it went live with the
Cerner system it was unaware that Newham Primary Care Trust in East
London had also reported a serious untoward incident after going
live with a similar basic system. Newham's system had lost details
on the appointments of more than 200 patients, many of them
children.
Nuffield said it believed any faults would have been detected
and dealt with by Connecting for Health, the agency responsible for
the programme.
A modified Cerner system based on the software installed at
Nuffield and Newham is due to be rolled out across Southern England
as part of the National Programme for IT.
Martyn Thomas, a visiting professor of software engineering at
Oxford University, told Channel 4 News, "It is alarming. If there
are known problems then they really ought to be communicated very
rapidly to other users of the system."
The Computer Weekly and Channel 4 News investigation also raises
questions about the National Programme in general. A hospital
consultant, Gordon Caldwell, said that if systems were too slow and
badly designed, they could be a major threat to the way hospitals
in England work.
A Connecting for Health spokesman said that before its
introduction at Nuffield the Cerner system had been "thoroughly
reviewed" and key NHS staff assessed it and visited Newham where it
"performed well". He said that Nuffield was "now working well with
the new system".
Asked whether it was aware of the Newham incident, Connecting
for Health told Channel 4 it did not know about it specifically,
but said the experience gained there was "incorporated into the
planning for the Nuffield deployment".
Watch the Channel 4
report
www.computerweekly.com/blogs/tony_collins
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