Star letter

I was fascinated by your article, “Can technology save the NHS?” ( see issue 270, p30), but I’m sure that anyone who, like myself, works on the NHS shop floor wouldn’t have known whether to laugh or cry at the gulf between the promised utopian view and the day-to-day reality.

The NHS has not so much embraced IT as stumbled across it. Where I work (a large, inner city, university teaching hospital), we have a disparate group of systems. There are too many to count: some off the shelf, some bespoke, many of which can’t communicate with each other. They’re running over a network that struggles to keep up, over Wi-Fi that might better be called “where-fi”, in places where no mobile phones (or bleeps for that matter) ever work, and numerous wards where staff queue to use the inadequate number of PCs.

If I want to manage a patient, I need to log in to see current electronic notes, but older notes are archived in a different system. I have to log in to another system to order or see the results of blood tests, and although I can also see X-ray reports there, I can’t see the X-rays themselves (that’s a different system, and a different login). The same applies to cardiac echoes.

To prescribe or review drugs is yet another system that has to be logged into. I can log in to book study leave (another system), but if I need to claim any expenses, you guessed it… that’s another system.

Our critical incident reporting system is another separate system, as is the patient administration system. Then there’s a different system for dictating letters and numerous other systems specific to various departments.

Laudable aims lie behind the introduction of each of these. Indeed, many actually work very well. But if the NHS is to harness the power of technology, it needs to travel a very different path from the one it is currently set on. Richard Wenstone, consultant in critical care medicine