Connecting for Health’s director of service implementation, Richard Jeavons, has attributed GP cynicism about IT modernisation to the newspapes and reports from Parliament’s scrunineer of public spending, the National Audit Office.
After speaking at the New Frontiers conference in London this week, Jeavons was asked by a GP clinical lead how cynical colleagues who have read about public sector IT failures might be better engaged. He replied: “It would be incredibly easy to be defensive and cynical based on what I read in my paper and what the National Audit Office writes and I completely understand that.”
He said he would engage the cynics with two lines of conversation. First, that the development of the use of IT in healthcare is a completely inevitable and enduring proposition. Second, that in the context of spending over the next 10 years the National Programme for IT will cost £6 billion from the £1000 billion likely to be spent on the service. “We shall have invested 0.6% of that [in the NPfIT] to create an infrastructure that will have enormous impact.”
Speaking from a grassroots perspective, Tony Howe, a GP from Dorset, said that he and colleagues were going through the introduction of Choose and Book and had signed up for the incentive payments for the adoption of smartcards and the October deadline for 50% electronic booking.
He said PCTs had been presented with a system not yet fit for purpose. It was slow and unstable, he said. “Why put these rigid date landmarks in place when we are being faced with an incomplete solution?” he asked.
Jeavons responded: “So what’s the learning from the reality you describe which I fully recognise?”
He rehearsed the lessons to be learned from the Choose and Book experience and concluded: “We have to be brutally tough and say we shouldn’t be here,” he said. But he added that despite the problems there was something worth having.
Connecting for Health GP clinical lead, Dr Gillian Braunold said UK GPs led the world in their use of IT but there were still problems with the system which needed to be solved. She said: “The 10% of treatment outside general practice is the most risky and patients care about it passionately. Why then is the information needed about it sitting in my surgery?”
She pointed to the work she and the other GP clinical lead, Professor Mike Pringle, were doing to co-ordinate views on the development of the summary record. The consultation, now in its 19th iteration was available on the internet and Dr Braunold said she was receiving six or seven sets of constructive comments a day on it.
“GPs are in the driving seat” she said.