I know, you like a factoid…
Try this…
A chef’s hat has exactly 100 pleats.
Another one?
Only 20% of NHS organisations are ‘digitally mature’. Just 86% of hosptials have a form of Electronic Patient Record in place.
More?
Only 45% of social care providers have any form of digital care records.
Why is it, in the era of the internet of everything, the NHS is always left with its trouser down?
It’s a long story.
The top line… ambition seduces common sense.
It’s happening again.
We’ve a new ‘Plan for Digital and Social Care’.
Who wrote it? Dunno…
…maybe Barbara Cartland lives-on and works at NHSE? It’s a love affair with tech… and a total lack of reality.
The issues are well rehearsed.
The NHS is in a hopeless tangle of good intentions, snake-oil-salesmen, people who don’t know the difference between machine learning and AI and senior management confused and beguiled.
Top of the shop from the report;
‘Our goal is for all ICSs and their constituent organisations to have all the attributes of digital maturity, including electronic records and other critical systems, by March 2025…’
Let’s ask some basic questions;
Why March 2025?
There is no operational justification, other than it’s the year of the election…
Constituent organisations?
Do you know how many ‘constituent organisations’ there are in an ICS?
Systems, place neighbourhoods, collaborations, voluntary partnerships…
… for example, Bassetlaw ICS has five ‘neighbourhoods’ and 36 ‘places’.
If that’s typical, across 42 ICS’, you’re probably looking at over 1,500 interfaces for data. Connecting everything from EPRs, to a pencil.
Digital maturity?
The last DM report I can find is an NHS self assessment from 2017… widely acknowledge to have been ‘gamed’ because there was the sniff of money in-the-air.
To get up-to-date, this report references another report, What Good Looks Like, which says;
‘[we will provide] an assessment framework which you will use to measure your level of digital maturity.’
Where is it? Dunno…
‘Goal’?
What does that mean?
Objective, target, desire, intention, idea, wish, hope, dream?
This is not management speak.
This is the speak of someone who’s covering their backside. Looking for a soft landing when half of this unravels.
March 2025?
Really? That is just thirty months away. Less holidays and weekends, about 600 working days… so…
… what are we doing today, that will get us to day 599, with everything done?
Dunno…
I do know…
… six hundred days of another wave of Covid, waiting lists longer than the Great Wall of China, staff shortages, fuel crisis, no workforce plan, a financial crisis, economy heading for the waste-basket, inflation as high as a kite and…
… almost none of the ICS’ anywhere near ready to know where their pencil sharpeners are coming from, never mind interoperable healthcare systems, procurement, implementation and user engagement.
Plus… this research project, from Coventry University, revealing;
‘… a lack of sufficient skills and knowledge in leading digital transformation in the NHS…’.
Unabashed, Barbara Cartland ploughs on. It uses the words ‘we will’ sixty-nine times.
Who is we? I think it means ‘me’ [author] if all goes well and ‘you’ if it doesn’t.
As far as I can see, top-line, there are over 149 deliverables on the list, the sketchiest of time-lines and no clarity about who is responsible.
The brutal truth; in the last ten years there have been 16, SoS initiatives that are virtually identical.
This is a cut and paste con trick.
What do we really need to do?
Just three things:
Readiness – ask people to be ready with an EPR by whatever date, tell them what to buy, give them the money to do it and the time to get up and running.
Normalisation – explain to people, mutualised access to data has to be normal.
Interoperability is too complex. ‘Normalisation’ is an industry standard procedure, quick, cheap and works.
Eisenhower – try his matrix;
Important and urgent tasks are top priorities.
Important but not urgent tasks are lower priorities, schedule for phase 2.
Urgent but not important tasks, park them.
Not urgent nor important tasks bin them.
NHS IT has been befuddled with complexity. This report makes it worse and worse still, it’s probably undeliverable and even worse, we won’t find out until it’s too late.
Complexity is fraud, it steals time and energy, persuades us we are clever and busy.
There is never a justification for complexity, if things can be simple…
… and they can be.
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
Discover more from The Training Network
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
