The NHS is in an IT ‘stone age’, as staff struggle with creaking infrastructure

Public services across the UK have long been feeling the pinch when it comes to expenditure, but staff at NHS hospitals are concerned this has now reached a critical point.

The British Medical Association, the UK’s main doctors union, estimated that doctors lost 13.5 million hours a year as a consequence of “inadequate IT systems and equipment”.

IT systems probably aren’t many people’s first thought when it comes to public spending, but they are crucial in keeping the NHS functioning and helping staff save lives. Since the 2010s the UK has spent almost £37 billion less on health assets than neighboring countries, such as France and Germany.

Not exactly efficient

“I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the Stone Age,” once pediatrician said. Doctors and nurses have outlined the need for all basic infrastructure to be raised to a minimum standard before new projects are taken on.

According to the NHS’s own estimates, just 20% of its organisations are "digitally mature", with some reporting an "enormous variation in basic infrastructure" within hospitals that slows systems down.

“We have a whole range of paper-based and digital systems, which leads to a huge potential for error,” said Dr Rosie Benneyworth, Head of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body. “We have seen delayed cancer diagnosis because of systems not speaking to one another.”

As well as making systems difficult to navigate and impeding health workers, legacy IT systems can pose serious risks in the form of vulnerabilities. Healthcare providers are attractive targets for cybercriminals, who will often try and leverage stolen data for money, or shut down life saving systems to disrupt operations.

Via Financial Times

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