Health IT pioneer, Frank Burns, to retire

Tags: E-Prescribing Foundation Trust HIS Information iS Strategic Wirral

07 Feb 2006

Frank Burns, chief executive of Wirral Hospital NHS Trust in Merseyside and a pioneer of healthcare IT in the UK, has announced that he will retire this summer.

In 1997, Burns was seconded by the Department of Health for 15 months as head of information management and technology at the NHS Executive with a remit to devise a new information strategy for the NHS.

Burns duly produced the 1998 NHS information strategy, Information for Health, which proposed a six level approach to implementing electronic patient records.

During his 16 year tenure as chief executive, the Wirral Hospital NHS Trust has won numerous awards for achievements in health IT in areas such as hospital e-prescribing and electronic scheduling for complex radiotherapy treatment.

Though Wirral blazed a trail, few other trusts managed to follow and targets for achieving the electronic patient record levels proposed in the strategy were missed badly.

In 2002, the Department of Health centralised the strategic management of electronic patient records, e-booking and the electronic transfer of prescriptions and created the NHS National Programme for IT.

Burns remains, however, one of the longest serving and well-respected chief executives in the NHS. In recognition of his services to healthcare, he was awarded a CBE.

Burns said: “After 40 demanding years in NHS management, it is time to think about slowing down a little. Wirral Hospital’s transition to NHS foundation trust status provides a natural opportunity for me to step aside for a successor.”

He joined the NHS in 1966 as an administrative trainee at Hope Hospital, Salford. Eight years later, at the age of 23, he returned to Hope Hospital as chief administrator, making him the youngest hospital manager in the country at the time.

Burns was appointed as general manager of Arrowe Park Hospital in 1989 and when Wirral Hospital NHS Trust was created two years later, he became chief executive. The trust has since gone on to become one of the most successful in the country, consistently achieving the maximum three stars in the NHS performance ratings.

Burns said: “I have had a great career in the NHS and have spent most of it running hospitals. If I had my time again I'd do it again. I can't think of a more fulfilling or interesting management role than overseeing a large hospital.”

“The last 16 years have been the best of my career. I have been fortunate to work alongside thousands of dedicated staff at Wirral Hospital and immensely proud of what we have achieved together.”

For the future, Burns, who is 56, is only saying that he does not plan to stop working completely and is keeping his options open for the moment.

The chief executive’s post will be advertised soon, with a successor likely to start work in July, a month after the trust’s application for NHS foundation trust status is submitted.

Readers Comments

Hmm..

07 Feb 06 15:10

>>Though Wirral blazed a trail, few other trusts managed to follow and targets for achieving the electronic patient record levels proposed in the strategy were missed badly.<<

Two implications of the above article that

1. Frank Burns was sole author of 'Information for Health'

2. The majority of trusts that 'failed' ever had a real chance to emulate the Wirral's achievements.

Burns plainly has an exceptional ability as a Chief Exec to bring clinicians on board and rally resources. However one wonders if only a quarter of the financial resources being flung at NPfIT had been available at Trust Level to implement systems under the IFH initiative, we would at very least now have a sizeable minority of hospitals with successful Level 4+ Electronic Medical records, an unparalleled level of implementation expertise within the NHS and a healthy informed choice of a range of system suppliers.

The magic formula

07 Feb 06 16:56

So Frank Burns's magic formula was: local ownership, local leadership, local clinical buy-in and local success! And he even wrote it down in Information for Health ("the national strategy for LOCAL implementation"). So just where did the cumbersome centralist CfH idea come from???

Resources and progress

07 Feb 06 16:58

I'll reiterate a point I made in a previous discussion: that £1bn of ring-fenced funding was made available to support the implementation of IfH in 1998, most of which was used for 'other priorities'. It's not quite a quarter of the funding for NPfIT/CFH, but it bought next to nothing in terms of IT development.

The flaw in the IfH approach was that it assumed that the majority of chief executives were like Frank Burns - that they recognised the role that IT could play in the efficient, effective management of patient care and would make it a priority.

Clearly this was not the case in 1998. The patchy state of NHS IT and the resistance faced by CFH suggests it may not be the case in 2006 either.

A question of balance

07 Feb 06 17:24

The Information for Health approach may well have been flawed insofar as it overestimated the level of local management and clinical commitment to NHS IT. But it's hard to seen how CfH's current approach is addressing this crucial local commitment problem. To say that its stakeholder engagement mechanisms got off to a shaky start would be an understatement, and the latest attempt, the Care Record Development Board, seems to have had little impact so far.

It has always been about the money

07 Feb 06 23:21

Nothing wrong with Frank Burns strategy. Our HA snaffled the money as usual.

I was reading Spoonful of Sugar tonight (how sad is that) !

in 2001, they said "151. A strongly centralised strategy runs directly counter to the government’s philosophy of decentralisation, expressed in Shifting the Balance of Power within the NHS (Ref. 89). Nevertheless, it is an option that merits urgent and serious consideration."

Sadly it should have been considered and then binned back then.

So even with my limited mathematical skills

09 Feb 06 08:58

we have spent about £8 billion in the last 8 years and got precisely where? I am writing this 20 metres away from our labs as the crow flies and still cannot get access to results on my desktop PC. My OPD letters are printed in triplicate, sent to patient and GP and filed in the notes by hand. Discharge summaries are hand written and sent by snail mail. We have no order comms. The piles of notes outside my office waiting for letters to be typed are raided daily by Medical Records for other clinics.

Every day, in every way, things are getting WORSE (with apologies to Proust)

Getting it right

10 Feb 06 08:57

Wirrals success is in part Franks Burns achievement, but key ingredients are that the system was 'owned' and developed in house by a clinically based team, and the team who developed and managed it did not fundamentally change for years, providing stability to be envied. Success would not have been achieved without several leaps of faith by dedicated departmental staff. Franks great talent seems to be to listen to everyone from geeks to clinicans and offer a considered approach, and not necesarily choosing the politically correct route.

Lessons ignored ...

10 Feb 06 11:47

I'd echo the last comment but particularly that Frank Burns's achievement in creating - through leadership - the local conditions for success should not be underestimated. And Wirral is not the only evidence for a local implementation focus: the NHSIA's ERDIP programme recognised the diversity of local situations (geographical, political, cultural etc etc) and the varied approaches that might need to be adopted.

Unfortunately, the learning from Wirral, and from the other ERDIP sites, on the importance of local factors seems to have been overlooked in the push for a centralised solution. The consequences are now becoming all-too-obvious.