Potentially infectious patients withMRSAwere not isolated for up to 17 days because of difficulties
with the Care Records Service - a central part of the NHS's
£12.4bnNational Programme for IT
(NPfIT).
Details of the problems at Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust
have emerged days after prime minister Gordon Brown promised "deep
clean" measures to stop the spread of hospital infections.
Buckinghamshire went live in September 2006 with one of the
first roll outs in the South of England of the
Care Records Service, supplied by
Fujitsu and
Cerner. The trust had support from
NHS Connecting for Health.
The government wants a care records service rolled out across
the NHS in England to provide reliable medical records on 50
million people that can be accessed wherever a patient is being
treated.
But in the 12 months after going live, Buckinghamshire has
reported a series of problems, including difficulties collecting
accurate data, which was "an area of major concern".
The trust reported that between March and July this year
potentially infectious patients with MRSA were not isolated for
between two and 17 days, because of what the trust said were
problems with the Care Records Service.
A trust spokesman said last week, "The trust continues to work
with Fujitsu to explore ways of resolving outstanding problems,
including difficulties in tracking MRSA patients electronically,
and the system will not be fully rolled out across the trust until
these issues have been ironed out."
The spokesman said that hospitals do not rely solely on
computer-based patient records systems for tracking patients with
infections, and that alerts are included in patient notes.
However, trust board papers show that some patients were not
isolated as staff were unaware they had MRSA because their medical
records were "unavailable". In another case, notes were not
marked.
The trust found that after going live at hospitals in Wycome and
Amersham, staff needed to enter historical MRSA alerts on systems
manually.
A trust board paper said, "This took approximately six weeks to
do, during which time there was a possibility that some
MRSA-positive patients may have slipped through undetected if
medical notes had not been available.
"There have been several other problems with the system which
have resulted in a small number of patients not being isolated
promptly."
A trust spokesman said there had been no Care Records
Service-related MRSA incidents since June.