Camden News: Royal Free Hospital | Computer Chaos | Andrew Way | London Acute Programme Board | Digital Patient Records System

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Camden News - by TOM FOOT
Published: 26 February 2009

Andrew Way

‘Chaotic’ computer system to be used in all hospitals

Decision comes despite IT meltdown in Royal Free trial

A COMPUTER system that plunged patient appointments at the Royal Free into chaos is set to be installed in hospitals across the capital following a recommendation from an advisory board chaired by the Hampstead hospital’s chief executive, Andrew Way.
Mr Way is chairman of the London Acute Programme Board, the body which has the final say on whether NHS trusts should adopt the digital patient records system.
The New Journal has seen papers which show the board has indicated that it would be happy for other hospitals to use the Cerner Millenium technology – even though Mr Way lashed out at its misfiring performance at his own hospital during a BBC radio interview last week.
He admitted the catastrophic introduction of the system at the Royal Free had led him to apologise to staff.
Mr Way, who gave the go-ahead for the Royal Free to become the first London trust to pilot the system last June, has been chairman of the advisory board for 18 months.
A plan to link up London trusts with the Cerner system was axed in October after four months of severe technical difficulties at the Royal Free.
But in January the scheme was restarted following approval by the London Acute Programme Board.
A spokesman for NHS London said: “The Acute Programme Board is made up of representatives of acute trusts.
“It is the board that took the decision to start the roll out of Cerner again at the start of January. They wouldn’t have taken that decision if they did not think it was all right.”
Public documents show that Mr Way reported “good progress” with Cerner to fellow board members at the Royal Free on January 29.
“The system is evidently more stable,” he said
But his confident words contrasted with his radio interview just a fortnight later in which he said the six months since the system was introduced in the Royal Free had been “the toughest days in my career”.
He said in the interview: “It is true to say that many medical staff are incredibly disappointed with what they’ve got [with the Cerner system] and I have personally apologised to them for the decision to implement the system before we were really clear what we were going to receive. We had been led to believe it would work.”
A hospital spokesman said last night (Wednesday) that Mr Way was unavailable for comment on his views on the system. He said it was hypothetically possible that decisions taken by the Acute Programme Board might not necessarily have had full backing from its chairman.
Cerner was supposed to speed up waiting times and booking outpatient appointments by allowing all medical staff to access all patients records using a special swipe card.
But it is now common knowledge that Royal Free staff encountered a series of difficulties.
The system installed in the hospital was different to the one they had been originally been trained to operate and 40 extra technical staff had to be hired to cope with repeated crashes. Thousands of appointments have been “lost” or affected and the hospital estimates it caused a £10million drain on resources
In a statement released by the hospital last week Mr Way said: “Technology, underpinning effective, efficient healthcare, is the only way forward for a modern progressive hospital like ours. We now have the basics of one of the world’s most highly regarded clinical IT systems established at the Royal Free.”

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