NHS chief exec pledges to help resolve CRS issues

05 Jun 2007

NHS chief executive David Nicholson has told Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Trust that they can count on his full support in resolving the problems they encountered in April after going live with the Millennium Care Records System provided by Fujitsu.

In April 79 members of staff from the trust signed a letter outlining their frustrations at the Millennium CRS system, describing the system "awkward and clunky" and stating: "In our opinion the system should not be installed in any further hospitals. Problems cited included incidences of lost records.

To help rebuild confidence and get a first hand picture on 14 May NHS chief executive David Nicholson and IT director Richard Granger visited the trust. "Mr Granger and Mr Nicholson gave the Trust their full support resolving issues related to CRS. The Trust is committed to working with CfH to improve CRS," a spokesperson told EHI.

NHS Connecting for Health said in April that there had been some "unacceptable problems" with the new system installed at Milton Keynes which "require immediate attention". Prime contractor Fujitsu said there had clearly been "some high impact problems".

The trust's finance director Rob Baird was quoted as saying: "The service to our patients in some areas has diminished in this period. At the moment we have quite a confused situation and it's like everyone had started a new job".

Since early April Fujitsu and Cerner have had a team working on site at Milton Keynes to resolve the problems.

The Milton Keynes spokesperson added that while progress was being made problems were still being worked through. "The Trust is working closely with Connecting for Health, Fujitsu and South Central SHA on resolving issues identified since the installation of CRS. Progress is being made, and clearly some issues will be solved more quickly than others."

Reader's Comments

Obvous consequences

05 Jun 07 13:23

The problems experienced by MK, Nuffield, Winchester, and preventing others from joining them are obvious consequences of the approaches adopted by CfH.

Healthcare is a bit more complex than rolling out software to retail or even congestion charging locations. Rigid standardisation, lack of attention to detail in the contractual process, and a failure to engage or listen to the users (not just the clinicians) have all led us here. And I don't think sticking plaster at this point will redeem the process.

And you forgot Weston-Super-Mare

05 Jun 07 16:15

One of the biggest problems with each CfH EPR implmentation is that it is announced, it "goes live", there are problems, and thereafter little, if anything else is ever publicly reported.

For instance, we all know that NOC, MK, Weston, and Winchester had problems with their implementaions (I think they're in the right chronological order), but publicly, nobody has ever come back to say that their problems have been resolved, lessons learned etc., and, ideally, that these implementations are now delivering the expected benefits or (at the least) are provding the trust concerned with something which is better than before for both staff and for patients.

Am I wrong, or being cynical?

Resistance by clinicians is predictable

14 Jun 07 16:05

My first response to the letter from 79 clinicians and staff at MK was surprise that more hadn't signed it. Every hospital system install I've known about has met strong resistance, especially from clinicians. When we installed TDS at the University of Virginia (major medical school and teaching hospital) in the mid-90s, the entire house staff (residents/junior doctors) went on strike and refused to use it. They simply did not want to enter their orders on a system, no matter how well it worked. Benefits such as paperless lab and pharmacy orders, nurse medication scheduling, automated worklists for blood-drawers, etc. meant nothing to them as they did not benefit them, they benefitted others in the hospital. HISs will allow medicine to move into the 21st century, but they are always resisted for a while. Then a few months or years down the road people wonder how they ever lived without them.