Public services across the country have been feeling the pressure for some time, but staff at NHS hospitals are concerned this has reached a critical point. The British Medical Association, Britain’s main doctors’ union, estimated that doctors lost 13.5 million hours a year due to “inadequate IT systems and equipment”.
IT systems are probably not many people’s first thoughts when it comes to government spending, but they are vital to keeping the NHS running and helping staff save lives. Since the 2010s, Britain has spent almost £37 billion less on healthcare than neighboring countries such as France and Germany.
“I’m in a top hospital in London and yet sometimes I feel like we’re operating in the Stone Age,” said a pediatrician Forbes. Doctors and nurses have outlined the need for all basic infrastructure to be brought to a minimum level before starting new projects.
Not exactly efficient
By the NHS’s own estimates, only 20% of its organizations are ‘digitally mature’, with some reporting ‘huge variation in basic infrastructure’ within hospitals that is slowing down systems.
“We have a whole range of paper and digital systems, which leads to a huge risk of error,” says Dr Rosie Benneyworth, head of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body. “We’ve seen delayed cancer diagnosis because systems weren’t talking to each other.”
In addition to being difficult to navigate and hindering healthcare workers, older IT systems can pose serious risks in the form of vulnerabilities. Healthcare providers are attractive targets for cybercriminals, who often try to use stolen data for money or shut down life-saving systems to disrupt business operations.
Via Financial times
