Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology.
- Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
- Date:
- 1996
Licence: Open Government Licence
Credit: Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology. Source: Wellcome Collection.
31/324 page 333
![16 April 1996 ] [ Continued Lord Hollick contd.] forward. Can I give an example in terms of electronic mail and the need for senior management to lead from the top. It is in the area of senior management that the NHS has inadequate awareness and skills. I say that because it is well known. In the Department of Health when we introduced an office information system, and everything in the Department of Health is done on electronic mail internally, as soon as the chief executive and the Executive Board started to use it they became irritated when they had to send paper to some people who were not on it. It so happened that I was one of the last, because of the building I was sitting in, and my director was highly irritated by the fact that I was not on it. Very quickly if you were not on it you did not exist because people would not put things into envelopes and send them to you. If we can persuade, and we do a great deal to try and persuade, senior management in the NHS to recognise the advantages simply at that sort of level, because it very often starts at that level, then we will begin to succeed. I am sure that awareness is increasing markedly in the NHS but I would not like to claim that it is as well and as good as I would like it to be because it is not. Lord Haskel 455. We heard from the BMA about benefits of the infrastructure and we have heard from you about how you are providing an infrastructure, we have also heard about how BT through PFI is providing the funds and providing the means of logging on to the NHSnet. You have told us that £5,000 is all that is required for a surgery to log on to the system. One gets the impression that everybody seems to be waiting for everybody else. I am wondering what is being done, in view of the fact that everybody agrees that the patient at the end of the day benefits, to promote the system and get everybody on to it and to just move the whole thing forward? (Mr Rogers) A great deal. I think we will be making rapid progress. I do have to emphasise these contracts were only put in place in the middle of last year so the amount of progress we have already made I think is: significant. There are several things. For example, the Cabinet Office efficiency scrutiny called Patients Not Paper had 25 recommendations relating to information management technology. I am charged with implementing those recommendations. If you strip them aside what they say is improve computerisation in GP practices and make their communications with the outside world electronic. We are now mounting what we call trailblazers to demonstrate how you can do that. We already have the message standards and message content agreed with the clinical professions, apart from the infrastructure that I mentioned. We know how to do it. We have now put it in place to demonstrate the advantages you get from doing it. The Executive is quite determined to push these recommendations through. I have now a deal—I hope—with British Telecom and the Supplies Authority to see all acute hospitals connected up by the end of the year at least for the purposes of all the supplies ordering. That will ensure that all the supplies staff are linked to their central organisation. That link can also be used, for example, for sending contracting data. We already have, again another PFI initiative, a clearing service that came into operation I think yesterday with the first exchanges of data. So during the course of this year all of that contracting data will be cleared by this clearing service and by the end of this year something like 30 million messages will be passing through that clearing service. That means that all health authorities and all acute providers, and I believe some other providers as well, will be in the business of structured messaging by the end of this financial year. That, I think, is quite a considerable degree of progress given the amount of time we have actually had these contracts in place. The people we are dealing with—Mercury, BT, BT Syntegra, AT&T Istel, who are running the clearing service -are very large telecommunications giants. They see the NHS as an enormous driver and they are very keen indeed to support all we are doing. I think that is exhibited by the amount of cash they have already injected into creating the infrastructure and their willingness to do deals with us to make sure everybody connects to it. I am optimistic about the GP end. I know already of one health authority which is very keen now to connect up all their GPs in the way that I said, and that is 88 GP practices, and all their hospitals and themselves, all for E-mail and all of these things. I suspect they will do so during the course of this year and I do not think they will be the only ones. Chairman] Any casual browser on the Internet knows there is a great deal of medical information so that is a thing that concerns us. Lord Hollick 456. I think one of the concerns we would have is of the quality of the information. We were talking to the BMA earlier about their concerns in this area. Does the NHS have any plans to put up their own site which will have verified reliable information which the public will be able to know and trust which is not to say the public will not be able to venture—as many of us do—into these other parts but at least they would know it was a reliable NHS site which had verified information on. (Mr Rogers) We have no current plans to put one up for the public. What we are launching now is, as mentioned, our NHS intranet called NHSweb which will enable NHS bodies to get at information of various kinds which could include medical material, would include access to libraries and could include access to almost anything you could think of including, for example, catalogues from suppliers since we allow people outside to put information on to allow people inside the NHS to get access to it. Within that provision anybody who puts up such a database—which could be a database of training material for doctors which could be extremely sensitive if the training material was not of good quality, and the position that we have struck here in agreement with representatives of the medical profession and ministers is that we will have a field in what you call the home pages, that can be completed or left blank. If it is completed it will say “certified by” whoever and therefore anybody claiming to have certified material can make the claim. If it is blank](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32218631_0031.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
