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Dept of Health

Answer

Dr. Murrison: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate his Department has made of the amount of staff time required to input data into the databases for the National Programme for Information Technology. [174106] Mr. Hutton: The national programme for information technology (IT) is implementing a series of IT solutions to improve patient choice and the quality of patient treatment and care. Fundamental to this is the national health service care records service (CRS) that will enable patient care information to be accessed at the point of need anywhere in England. The intention is to ensure that information on a patient is captured once and used operationally across a range of care settings and in support of a care pathway. This saves time for clinicians and avoids patients having to repeat the same information over and over again as they move from department to department or clinician to clinician. In most cases, information will be transferred automatically from existing local IT systems and Patient Administration Systems into the nationally available NHS CRS. This will be a similar process to what happens with existing systems every time there is a system refresh or upgrade. The recording of information about patients is part of normal clinical practice, and it is not envisaged that the use of the NHS CRS will require any significant additional effort from NHS staff than with existing processes and systems.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

174106; 422 c40-1W

Session

2003-04

Subjects

Data processing ICT NHS Medical records NHS National Programme for Information Technology

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk