Integrating healthcare and socialcare — meeting the challenge
Roger Staton, Head of the DoH’s Social Care Information Policy
Unit, outlines the main requirements for carrying out the integration
agenda and how the most problematic areas are starting to be tackled.
keywords: electronic
healthcare and socialcare records, systems development, culture,
capacity
abstract
In both healthcare and socialcare significant numbers of service
users are dealt with each week. Although many of them are recipients of
both services, basic information about them is often not shared by the
care-provider agencies. This failure to exchange information can
sometimes have serious consequences, such as the death of Victoria
Climbié. Why is information not exchanged? What are the obstacles to
integration? A key factor is culture. IT solutions alone cannot overcome
all the integration problems. There is a need to change the way people
and organisations think and work.
The National Programme for IT in the NHS is tackling some of the
problems. In socialcare, work is being done on electronic socialcare
records, information governance, connectivity and education and
training. Over all there is a substantial agenda to meet the challenges
of integrating the two services, but there are concerns about the local
capacities to achieve it. When funding is made available for capital
investment, it is not always matched by provision for recurrent
expenditure.
Br J Healthcare Comput Info Manage 2003; 20(6): 18–20. |
