Nothing like deadlines to make things happen!!!!!

Posted on | November 11, 2009 | Author: | MiliPatel | No Comments

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The last few weeks have been some of the busiest in the NHS Project management world, specifically with a flurry of activity surrounding the National Programme for I.T.

We saw a local NHS Trust – Bury Primary Care Trust – go live with Lorenzo electronic patient record (EPC) software, the first trust to use this version of software. As part of the NHS Connecting for Health IT Programme, one aim is to transfer 60 million paper-based records to EPC by 2010. Being able to share patient information between departments and locations is important, as it allows medical personnel to know instantly what medication a patient is taking.

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children’s NHS Trust became the first pediatric hospital in the UK to complete the roll-out of an Electronic Prescribing system. The key aim of the implementation has been to improve patient safety by reducing the errors associated with using the paper system.

Broadhurst Street Medical Practice in Leicester became the 1000th GP practice to implement a new electronic health record system, delivered under NPfIT. The system will allow doctors to access patient information wherever they are, rather than struggling to find paper documents stored wherever the patient was last treated.

The National Programme for I.T (NPfIT) is in its 7th year of implementation. In April Christine Connelly, the DOH’s director general for informatics, said that LSPs must make “significant progress” by the end of November, or the department will “move to a new plan for delivering informatics in healthcare”. The original completion date for NPfIT was 2014, but it is widely accepted that several elements of the programme will not be completed by then.

NPfIT is designed to reform the way the NHS uses information, and hence to improve services and the quality of patient care. The Programme’s aims are ambitious, and its scale and complexity make delivery more challenging than similar projects elsewhere in the world. The Programme requires substantial organisational and cultural change to be successful and it is dependent on the deployment of systems in an increasingly devolved NHS.

Other major Programmes and Projects in the NHS include cutting energy bills by £1.1m a year and reducing annual carbon emissions by 8,100 tonnes, according the Health Science Journal. This represents a target for 17 NHS trusts across England. One trust that received particular notice for their carbon emissions reduction was the Stockport Foundation Trust.

‘Stockport Foundation Trust, which is aiming to cut emissions by half over 10 years, is one of the first to complete the Carbon Trust’s NHS carbon management programme,’ according to the Health Science Journal article.

Got other Projects/Programmes in the NHS you want to share? Leave me a comment at editor@arraspeople.co.uk.