NHS needs hard kick in IT butt

This story was first published in the INQUIRER but like the other first 15 stories, got displaced by .net code

By Mike Magee, 8 April 2001 14.57 BST

WE HAD PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITY to observe shortages, incompetencies, glitches and stitches when we found ourselves in Northwick Park hospital for a five week stay, earlier this year.

Stricken by a myocardial infarction (MI) just 45 minutes after writing a story about Richard Crisp and Rambus, we had plenty of occasion to reflect on our life in IT after yours truly found himself to be a bed blocker in a five week NHS nightmare.

It's boring being in hospital but if you have an IT background you can spot all the holes in the cistern and really, there's a monumental waste of time and money happening, Mr. Blair.

It's difficult to fault the doctors, nurses and the other staff at Northwick Park, working as they are under the burden of bureaucracy, top-heavy management, terrible lack of resources and a never ending supply of new patients, but the lack of IT integration in the medical system is nothing short of a scandal.

For example, in the Jenner Ward, which was my home for five weeks (overall cost GBP 3,000 a day in the intensive care unit, GBP 1,500 in the cardiac ward a day), the nurses dutifully take your blood pressure, temperature, pulse several times a day and then write the results down on a piece of paper which is filed away in an A4 folder.

Some of the electronic equipment used to collect this data, however is pretty impressive, whether made by Siemens or HP, but they integrate with each other not at all, and while it's nice to hear those re-assuring beeps at 6 am, it seems a little odd that someone has to borrow a pen so they can write them down and record them.

There's an excellent unit adjacent to Northwick Park which performs angiograms - a technique in which a catheter is inserted into your femoral artery and dye injected, and which lets the doctors and surgeons see whether or not your coronary arteries are clogged. At Northwick Park, unfortunately, they do not have permission or resources to perform the angioplasty which can be performed, and so you have to hang around, often for weeks, before being shipped out to two or three feeder hospitals, Harefield (in my case), St. Mary's, or the Brompton.

When you eventually get shipped there, the surgeons have to go through the angiogram process all over again, and get themselves ready to plasty you up and add the one cent stent, or whatever. In my case, it was decided angioplasty wasn't a goer and a bypass was on the cards. I'm now on that six month NHS list.

The surgeons at Harefield seemed particularly annoyed that no films of my angiogram at Northwick Park came with me. That, explained one, would have saved time and also the femoral cut I underwent.

When I was hanging around having no fun at Northwick Park, I did suggest to the authorities that it would be possible to put these angiogram films on a joint Internet site, thus saving time and money. Patients can be such a pain.

However, while a surgeon was chatting to me in my downtime in Middlesex, he said that HP had invented a cute little device which took all your vital signs, dialled up to a central location and if there were any problems soever, instituted some kind of a process to remedy the problems.

This sounds good to me, but judging from my first hand experience, the chances of anyone, for example UK Health Minister Milburn, authorising such a radical purchase, are considerably less than anyone getting an angiogram within two weeks at Northwick Park.

The whole thing is scandalous from a research point of view. All the raw data gained at first hand from patients pouring through the door and sitting around for weeks is ending up on paper and not on machines, where at least some real research could be done.

The National Health Service (NHS) indeed, is so strapped for either cash or sensible management, that it's a surprise the whole creaky edifice works at all... µ