Five new ‘Enterprise Communities’ have been announced to speed up the introduction of electronic booked admissions into the NHS. The five sites will be supported by £2m of funding.
In an address to NHS Booked Admissions Programme staff in Manchester today, health minister John Hutton said: "These new Enterprise Communities are leading the biggest healthcare change programme in the world today – a programme on the leading edge of service redesign."
The five sites to receive the investment are South East London, North West London, Dorset, Manchester and West Yorkshire. Manchester and West Yorkshire will lead on planning and procurement for electronic systems, while the others will look at developing and demonstrating systems.
Booked admissions were one of four top priority areas for NHS IT development identified by NHS Director of Research, Analysis and Information, Sir John Pattison in his speech at Healthcare Computing 2002 last week. The other three priorities announced were bandwidth, electronic records and e-prescribing.
The NHS booked admissions programme was launched in 1998, and has been extended so that every NHS Trust is now booking patients in at least two specialities or frequently carried out procedures.
According to the latest DH figures approximately five million patients have now received a booked admission, using electronic or telephone-based systems, for their hospital appointment or operation.
Early evidence from trusts carrying out booked admissions suggests that such systems can reduce the instances of patients failing to turn up for appointments (DNAs) by up to 15%.
Ultimately, all hospital appointments and admissions will be booked on a date to suit the patient with a few clicks of a mouse or a telephone call, Hutton said.
The NHS Plan pledged that all waiting lists for hospital appointments and admission will be abolished by 2005 and replaced with booking systems that give all patients a choice of a convenient time within a guaranteed maximum waiting time.
"The work done over the next two years will allow us to develop an NHS capable of withstanding the intense public scrutiny that it now faces and which will deliver a patient centred NHS that embraces greater choice and greater access to health services," said Hutton.
As well as the five Enterprise Communities, Hutton announced that shadow electronic booking communities currently being established. These will be in place from May 2002 and be given developmental support to help them prepare for the ‘Phase 1 Spread Programme’, which they lead from Autumn 2002.
In April 2001 the Information Policy Unit published an Outline Business Case (OBC) for Electronic Booking Systems, providing a framework for electronic booking implementation. http://www.doh.gov.uk/nhsplanbookingsystems .