Keir Starmer's Technofix For The NHS: Déjà Vu Disaster Or Brave New Blunder?
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Comment 20 years after the biggest public sector tech disaster in UK history resulted in £12 billion in contract exodus, they have again…
'They' are the Labor Party and it's a promise to fix the NHS with the magic of 'technology'.
In an editorial in the Guardian, the opposition leader lamented the state of the NHS following the collapse of the pandemic and disputed funding.
But workers are in a difficult position. Despite the chances of winning the next general election, perhaps in 2024, there are politically limited opportunities to raise taxes for one of the world's largest healthcare providers in England, which has an annual budget of £160.4 billion and is tackling chronic shortages . They have doctors and nurses
"There is another change that will completely reform the NHS and the way it works and the way we save money," said the opposition leader, heartbroken by the vision of a better future that only he could see.
Is that changing you ask? “The transition from an analogue system to a fully digital NHS. Ministers will recognize that the NHS will benefit from advances in science and technology," said Sir Kerr.
Yes / Yes. Only a few ministers - in the 25 years since the dot-com boom pushed the elixir of the IT bubble to the top of the economic and political agenda - believe the NHS could be more effective with technology investments.
The problem is that they did. Several times. And it didn't end well.
The National Informatics Program (NPfiIT), which started in 2003 under the Labor government with a budget of £12.7 billion, has met with little success in its efforts to make eHealth information available across the NHS.
In 2011, the National Audit Office (NAO) found that the £2.7 billion spent to date was not value for money. "Based on past performance, the NAO cannot guarantee that the remaining £4.3 billion spent on the care registry system will be any different," he said.
After the failure of NPfiT - many of which were among the few successes - the Coalition and Conservative governments had more modest ambitions for NHS IT but were disappointed nonetheless.
In 2020, the NAO states that a lack of systemic learning from past mistakes “remains a high risk across all sectors” of the government’s “Digital Transformation Portfolio” in 2020. It was launched in 2014.
Since then there have been other trials. In As early as 2022, Britain's Health Secretary was looking for "state-of-the-art technology" to help down England's 6 million waiting list hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, in June of the same year, the NHS pledged £2billion in support for the introduction of electronic health records in all hospitals and group practices by 2025.
Despite more than 20 years of initiative, the mistakes are obvious. In December last year, a study by the British Medical Association found that inadequate IT systems and tools cost more than 13.5 million hours of work in the UK healthcare sector alone.
A glaring example is the catastrophic failure of Guy & Saint Electronics' healthcare system. It took Thomas Hospitals two months during the 2022 summer heat to fully recover from problems with 371 IT systems.
As if none of this were self-evident, Starmer promised "more choice for patients and the ability to better control our health."
The commitment to the IT state program was earlier. In the year Select & Book was planned in 2000 and was funded in 2003 by a five-year £64.5 million deal with commercial operator Atos. It enables patients to book hospital appointments in consultation with doctors via an electronic booking system. It was canceled in 2014.
The problem was that there was practically no alternative. In 2014, a study found that during a general consultation, "when the choice of hospital is not given at all or is presented as an external requirement of the patient (something the doctor must do)," physicians often use humor or express frustration. what he emphasized. . It's absurd the way it looks.
The study did not find a single instance where a patient chose to go somewhere other than their local hospital, and only once (in one instance) did a staff member override that decision.
That's not to say technology can't help the NHS. Technology can improve, and if properly defined, it can also create efficiencies. But it would be foolish to hope that technology can magically be used to solve deep and complex organizational problems. And you could make it worse. ®
