On the 7th of March 2006, the Dept of Health & the Home Office announced far reaching changes to the immigration controls applicable to medical staff working in the UK.
Some of the words used to describe the policy have included racism, discrimination, destructive & flagrant exploitation.
 A fair summary of the response is covered on the BMJ Careers website.
The search for a legacy has consequences, almost all of them negative. Whatever the accountants might say, it is not possible to provide the same service at one price all over the country. Penny-pinching rules!
And just for reference, another idea bites the dust. Patient forums were created just 2 years ago & were known to be a bad idea at the time.
Isoft seem to be having trouble all over the place as hot on the heels of their difficulties with the Nuffield hospital in Oxford comes news of ongoing problems with the implementation of clinical records systems in Surrey.
Epsom & St Helier NHS Trust has been struggling with the implementation of Isoft Patient Manager & Clinical Manager packages for the past year but the situation has been out of control in the last 4 months following an update to support Choose & Book with various departments including Accident & Emergency having to fall back entirely to using paper records for months on end. Patients details are not available on the system, investigations can’t be ordered leading to extended inpatient stays & delays, results go missing & appointments cannot be booked normally leading to duplication & delays. And this is for software that has been sold & supported since 2002! What is going to happen when the new functionality promised by Connecting for Health is ready?
Given that these departments had been using older software for years, just how much trouble Isoft is having can be imagined.
This does not appear to be an isolated instance with quite a few hospitals suffering the same consequences and the Department of Health fully aware of & putting pressure on Isoft to improve performance. I wonder though if the contracts negotiated with the LSP’s in secret by the DOH include clauses for damages to be paid by the contactors if the performance of the system is worse than when they started.
NHS computer delays surgery
“One of the first hospitals in the country to test the new software of a £6.2 billion NHS computer system has blamed it for the disappearance of patient records, cancelled operations and delays in outpatient appointments.
The problems have been so severe that the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust in Oxford is still unable to collate basic patient data or compile waiting list records for the Department of Health
Gordon Hextall, the chief operating officer of the project, admitted this weekend that the final cost of the project to the NHS could reach £15 billion.”
Repeat after me, there is no problem. Everything is going according to plan & these are just teething troubles.
Computer Weekly seems to be on a roll here but is beaten to the punch on its own campaign by the non-technical media as the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph & the BBC fight to cover this.
The exalted managers (or headless chickens as I prefer to call them) who run little fiefdoms in the NHS have come up with a new wheeze to save money. Having carried out a review of the activity of the service & analysed the costs, they have found that wages are the main element and decided that they could come in under budget if there were no staff & therefore no pesky patients to treat.
In what appears to be merely the first publicly reported incidence of this approach being piloted, managers at Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS trust who run West Cornwall hospital in Penzance decided not to replace the duty doctor when he called in sick on Friday. Ambulance crews were told to take seriously ill patients to another hospital 35 miles away at Treliske, Truro.
A spokeswoman for the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust said: “We have got a financial recovery programme in place at the moment; This doctor went off sick and we decided as a result not to hire a locum. We considered the financial aspect of this first and foremost. We have a statutory duty to break even, and this is part of our plan to reduce costs.”
Ah, the wonderful world of British bureaucracy, I wish someone would pay me to dream up things like this!
(The background to all this cutting down to size!)
Hmmm, what is there left to say? (Err, what have I been saying for the past 3 years?)
Accenture blames Isoft for its delay in meeting the deadlines for implementation & makes a provision of £260 million to cover losses.
Then Isoft shares fall by 47% in one afternoon.
CSC seem to be coping with Isoft’s performance but have featured here before & who knows what the future holds.
Did I miss Fujitsu / BT? Have no fear, they have pride of place in this report.
And I can’t seem to decide if this is meant to be flattery or an expose.
Or to use another cliche, the dominoes are lining up.
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