Responding to proposals set out in the Department of Health’s consultation Liberating the NHS: An Information Revolution (launched earlier today), Professor John Williams, Director of the Health Informatics Unit at the Royal College of Physicians said:
The government's acknowledgement that the primary use of information should be to support quality patient care is very welcome. As it stands the management of data in the NHS leaves much to be desired. Useful information rarely follows the patient through the system, making it more difficult for doctors and nurses to provide them with the personalised treatment they have a right to expect. And where health professionals do have access to records they are often inaccurate, thus increasing the risk of error. Bad data also makes for bad management decisions as well as clinical ones. Administrators are forced to rely on dubious process driven statistics when allocating resources, when what they actually need is a clear picture, rooted in clinical reality, of what treatments are working and which teams are performing well or badly.
This consultation is an opportunity for the health service to ask itself some searching questions about whether it has the right systemsin place to accurately judge its own performance. Indeed, the tougher financial climate makes this imperative. We will draw on our recent experience of building a profession wide consensus around the need for a patient centred, standardised medical record to formulate a detailed response.
- The consultation document can be viewed at the Department of Health website