£5bn NHS IT programme: 'Technology is not the challenge'

Getting doctors, nurses and clinicians to change the way they work is the biggest issue facing the NHS' £5bn IT modernisation programme - not the technology itself, according to the NHS Confederation.

The NHS Confederation represents all the trusts and health authorities in the UK, and a survey of 158 of its members found that while many have started planning the change management that will be needed to work with the new electronic care records and IT systems, a significant minority have yet to look at how it will affect their frontline clinical staff.

The survey found that three-quarters of those who responded have either conducted or made plans to conduct an assessment of their organisational readiness for electronic booking and the NHS Care Records Service, and have either started or plan to start a clinical engagement programme.

Gary Fereday, policy manager at the NHS Confederation, admitted to silicon.com that while 90 per cent of clinical staff broadly understand and will engage with the new technology, there exists a hardcore of about 10 per cent who find it challenging and will be "difficult to engage".

Although some concerns have been raised by local health authorities and GPs about a funding shortfall that they will have to make up to implement the new systems, Fereday said that the NHS National Programme for IT represents a real opportunity to modernise the UK's health service.

"We can't simply computerise the existing pathways of care. That will leverage some efficiency gains and improvements in quality of care but it will miss a trick. We can use this technology to fundamentally change the way we deliver care, with things such as the rapid transfer of results and digital imaging," he said.

And convincing GPs, doctors and nurses that the new technology is not a threat to their professional judgement will be the biggest challenge - not implementing the technology, according to Fereday.

"The technical side is the least problematic. We've got to take that as a given that it is all going to work. We need to present this to the clinical world in such a way that they don't perceive it to be a challenge to their medical autonomy. We want to be working with them and not foisting it upon them."

The survey coincides with an announcement by the Health minister John Hutton of £30m in extra funding to ensure GPs' IT systems are ready for the implementation of the new GP contracts in April.

The additional money tops up the £20m already invested in primary care IT to enable GPs to have in place the IT systems to process the clinical data that is central to the new quality-based contracts. GPs will be receiving letters next week revealing how much their Primary Care trust is getting.