‘18 Weeks’: spinal trauma for informatics camels
Earlier this year, ASSIST, the Association for Informatics Professionals
in Health and Social Care, warned that new Government policies for
healthcare are not taking the informatics aspects into account when budgets
and deadlines are set for their enactment and that, as a consequence, the
success of new initiatives is undermined from the start. In this article
Brian Derry, the Association’s Vice Chairman, illustrates the problem
more fully and calls for every new DoH policy to include a thorough
assessment of its informatics requirements.
ABSTRACT New Government
policies in the public sector are making inadequate provision for their
inherent information-processing requirements. An example is the Department
of Health’s recent pledge that no patient will wait for longer than 18 weeks
between a GP referral and hospital treatment, which it expects the NHS to be
operating by December 2008. Implementing it will affect a wide range of
information systems, from clinician record keeping to core NHS ICT systems.
While much about the new guarantee remains to be resolved, the DoH has
established a long list of new central information requirements that require
changes to existing datasets, as well as the creation of several new sets.
Although eight pragmatic ideas for tackling the informatics aspects are
given, as things stand, the 18-weeks guarantee may well be the straw that
breaks the camel’s back in informatics departments across the NHS and
England’s National Programme for IT.
Br J Healthcare Comput Info Manage 2006; 23(6): 16–18. |
