PATIENT RECORDS
Barry Murphy, on behalf of Oasis Medical Solutions, speaks to informatics director Peter Lewis of Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
I
was on my way to meet Peter Lewis at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, appointed director of informatics at the trust in December 2009: his first job in the NHS. His background is in industrial- strength operational management in the private sector, having cut his teeth at the Post Office.
I wanted to find out how he was adjusting to working in the NHS and the value he thought he was bringing to it. Driving south on the A3, I heard several interesting news items on the radio.
“The National Audit Office has published a damning report of NHS information technology, which it says is failing in a number of key areas.”
“Stop bashing NHS managers” – the message from a new report from the King’s Fund.
Health minister Simon Burns revealed that, in his view, “the National Programme had been an expensive farce from the outset”.
I was about to meet the person in charge of Information Management and Technology (IM&T) at a major NHS trust. I realised that we would certainly not run out of things to talk about.
Joining the NHS I was keen to find out why Lewis had joined
28 | national health executive May/Jun 11
the NHS in the first place. “It was a good opportunity,” he said. He made it clear that he hadn’t switched to public service in a spirit of altruism. He explained that he thought the job specification looked really interesting; it was an important role on a big scale. The trust serves a local population of over 320,000 and is the lead specialist centre for cancer patients serving a population of over 1.2 million. But, most of all, he believed he could make a positive difference to the patients and staff of the trust.
It soon became clear that I had met a manager responsible for all the information and communications technology in a large hospital, who wasn’t particularly interested in the technology itself.
“I’m not an IT person,” he told me. “I am a general manager who understands the role that technology can play in making purposeful and positive change.”
Positive change
In fact I discovered, as the morning went on, that he understood a great deal about technology and where it was going but he insisted that his attention was focused on the journey of positive change he and his colleagues were travelling. I asked him to define his role in the trust.
“I am accountable for delivering all the information that is relevant in the right
place when needed. And I see my job as worrying about and finding the right answer to three big questions. Firstly, how best to acquire data – the what, when and where aspects. Secondly, what is the right way to store it so that it is safe and secure – yet available when and where it is needed? And thirdly, how do I turn data into information and present it effectively to help us make the right decisions.”
We walked around some of the busiest areas of the hospital and Lewis told me that it felt to him like a demanding retail environment, with patients and staff all busily moving around. Sometimes the patients seemed a bit lost and confused about how to get to their clinic or where to go for their tests.
“We say that we put patients first in all we do across all the different parts of the hospital and that is undoubtedly true,” he insisted. “And we genuinely do deliver excellent outcomes for our patients. But I am especially interested in ways that we can improve the patient experience. When patients look back on what happened to them at the Royal Surrey they don’t, in my opinion, focus only on the outcome of the service they received. The way that service was delivered is, for many, inseparable from the quality of service itself.”
Patient records I was taken to one of the outpatient clinics
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