Speech from the Chairman of the IT Committee
Dr John Powell
Thursday 1 July 2004
The Information Technology Committee is a cross-craft committee, bringing together the views of all clinicians on information technology matters.
Information is central to medical practice. As doctors we are managing information all the time. Whether we are taking a history from a patient, sharing clinical findings with a colleague, checking test results, or keeping up-to-date with research findings, we are constantly managing information.
Technology offers the potential to manage information in new and better ways and to make us better, more effective doctors. The recent Wanless reports have emphasised the importance of IT in the future of UK healthcare, bringing improvements to both our working practices, and to patient care.
However, we must not be led by the novelty of the technology. We must place the computers, the networks and so on, firmly in the context of our everyday work with patients and with each other. If technology can help us to manage knowledge and the flows of information better, then we need to make sure we get the systems in place which are going to bring most benefit to patient care and working practices.
In England the government is investing 6.2 billion pounds in the National Programme for IT in the NHS over the next 5 years. To illustrate the scale of this undertaking this expenditure is more than the £6.1 billion which the government spent last year on the whole of primary care. This programme aims to provide electronic patient records, electronic booking of clinic appointments, and a system for the electronic transmission of prescriptions – all within a modern NHS IT infrastructure. Similar initiatives are underway in the other countries of the UK.
Inevitably, issues relating to these programmes have dominated the work of the committee during the past session. The BMA welcomes wholeheartedly the prospect of a modern, properly integrated information network in the NHS. We have all struggled with the consequences of past failures in NHS IT. We have struggled with outdated systems, or become frustrated at the inefficiencies caused by a lack of common standards and interoperability. I believe doctors must welcome a national approach to tackling these issues, and do what we can to ensure success.
The Government has laid out ambitious plans for the NHS. IT plays a pivotal role. The National Programme for IT is set to revolutionalise the way we deliver health care. It is crucial that the Government gets the implementation right if it is to successfully meet its NHS Plan targets.
There are significant problems to overcome. The government's own research has shown that only 4% of doctors feel they have been adequately consulted about this major national programme. There has been a failure to engage with the staff who will be using these new systems. This is a massive programme of change, one of the largest IT initiatives in the world, and yet the very people who are going to be most affected by the change have not been sufficiently involved. This is not good enough. The IT committee have been lobbying hard to address this - through a media campaign in the national and specialist press, on national radio and in online publications. We have been ensuring that the BMA’s detailed concerns are heard and acted upon by Ministers and the Department of Health, and we have finally managed to establish an ongoing dialogue with senior officials in order to voice our concerns.
This is not about the technology, this is about how we manage information, and sometimes technology provides the solution. But fundamentally we must understand how doctors use information. To reflect this, the title Information Technology Committee will be abandoned and we will be adopting the name "Health Information Management Committee". The new Committee will continue to speak on behalf of all crafts and will help ensure that IT and other information management matters are high on the agenda of all craft meetings. This work continues to require broad representation from across the profession, and we propose that from next year two Committee members be elected directly at the ARM.
We will be holding a conference during the coming Session to engage the profession in discussions around information management and IT in healthcare, and to help guide our agenda for the future.
I would like to thank my colleagues on the committee, and give our grateful thanks to the committee Secretariat for their invaluable help and support over the last year.