back to article NHS*IT: Welsh system outages put patients at risk

The pressures the NHS in England and Wales is under, with creaking IT systems that aren't fit for purpose but which are facing the increasing tightening of purse-strings, have been laid bare in two reports. NHS outages KO Welsh GP services and Manchester A&E READ MORE The first is an assessment of the NHS Wales Informatics …

  1. LeahroyNake

    NHS Wales

    It seems quite up to date and streamlined from my experience?

    From my own experience...

    Pain in face that was a sinus infection probably caused by a bad tooth. Day 1 doctor prescribed Antibiotics/ 7 day course. I was in the dentist 14 days later, x Ray done and results instant on the dentist pc. The dentist had my medical notes and removed the tooth. The sinus infection had caused wax build up ( may be a coincidence) but the Dr had already refered me to a specialist ENT hospital. A month later I can hear normally.

    Everything was electronic apart from the prescription and me signing a form at the dentist that cost ~£40 for the extraction and hygienist appointment. Booking in at the doctors and ENT was via touch screen and I only had to wait 10 minutes past the appointment time.

    As an end user of the Welsh NHS I think it is outstanding !

    1. Semtex451

      Re: NHS Wales

      Finally some good news.

      I wonder would that have happened in NHS England -land

    2. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: NHS Wales

      This is the standard response these days - when everything works nobody notices or cares much, but one tiny issue and MY GOD THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, THE SKY IS FALLING OMGOMGOMG!

      Oh wait, looks like I disconnected from the Wi-Fi AP.

    3. BongoJoe

      Re: NHS Wales

      Leahroy, when it worked in Wales it worked well.

      However, when I was in my local doctor's surgery in North Wales on Pen Llŷn (I don't know where you were) , I would consantly be the one to reset the touch screen to enable it to work. This was down most days due to cookie or JavaScript errors and the practice would be reluctant to call the engineer out because it would take time and a hefly call-out fee.

      So I would do it as I was passing the practise.

      You are fortunate in that your dentist having your notes because my experience is otherwise. The notes would be fine and handed around if one was in the same area. If I went to the hospital at, say, Bangor then some of the notes would be available to the hospital, most of it would be missing. Any prescriptions from the consultant would be given to me on a yellow slip of paper and I had to personally go back to the practice and hand that over and then they would type that into the system.

      If one had to go to a consultant outside of the Trust area or, worse, outside of the country to England then no information would be following and one had to make sure that you took all of your patient's notes with you and then anything new would have to be copied and added to the doctor's notes back on the Peninsula.

      In another part of North Wales there is a sort of shared directory between units (called 'drive z': which may give a clue as to how its set up) and one's data may be on that somewhere.

      You may have been in a better Trust area, say South Wales, and you may have had no experience with taking your data out of the Trust area and into another or over into England.

      My experience is the complete opposite of yours and, as a full time carer for my wife who suffers from an auto-immune disease, I can say that I have seen a lot of the NHS in North Wales, particularly the Betws Cadwalader Trust.

      One day I was with my wife for a cardio examination. We watched the scan on the screen in real time (sitting in effectively a broom cupboard at the top of the main stairs) , watched her heart leaking (the disease) and also watched the technician take screenshots for the records.

      None of this information ever reached her records. Not one of the pictures and there's no provision anyway of the video to be stored with the notes anyway. In fact her visit that day wasn't even registered in her notes and we have to tell every practictioner that she went that day and what we remember was the result.

      From talking to other out-patients using Betws Cadwalader this isn't an isolated case.

      One day it was my turn. I had an 'emergency' appointment to see a brain consultant because it was feared that I had a stroke. Never mind the fact that the appointment to see the consultant was given as a date three years into the future but when I finally got there, he opened my data records and it was empty.

      Three years that appointment took and they still couldn't get my data collated in all that time.

      I think, Leahroy, you were very fortunate.

    4. BongoJoe

      Re: NHS Wales

      > LeahroyNake

      I have no idea why you received a downvote. I, for one, don't disbelieve a single word that you wrote so there is surely no need for a downvote from me.

      I have noticed throughout, however, these pages that any positive comments about Wales receives downvotes as a matter of course.

      There is no reason for yours to have been downvoted at all.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: NHS Wales

        "I have noticed throughout, however, these pages that any positive comments about Wales receives downvotes as a matter of course."

        Someone was determined to prove you right so have an upvote.

    5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: NHS Wales

      "x Ray done and results instant on the dentist pc"

      Remembering the days of wet chemistry for developing X-rays and even the gains resulting in use of Polaroid-type film I'm still surprised by the speed by which they can get an image onto the PC. Is the "film" some type of CCD?

  2. ArrZarr Silver badge
    Happy

    "based on software that hasn’t been supported by Microsoft since 2014."

    To take a wild stab in the dark, is this XP we're talking about?

  3. sanmigueelbeer

    a replacement hasn’t been found.

    Don't worry. As soon as the site gets hit with a very virulent file encryption worm, a "replacement" will be found.

    `tis all about "risk assessment".

  4. Andy Denton

    It's a lot better than the English model...

    The English model of each trust using whatever half-arsed system they can acquire is an utter shambles. E.g. Rotherham were using some US system that required Radiology to raise an invoice to A & E for every X-Ray/Image taken and a lot of manual work cancelling and writing off these invoices periodically. This system is of course entirely incompatible with Leeds or Sheffield who run entirely different systems that can barely share basic information between each other.

    I contracted as a senior dev at NWIS for almost 2 years. They have a standard system for hospital PAS (Myrddin), Cancer (the mentioned CANISC), Radiology (RADIS) and all these systems feed information into the Welsh Clinical Portal to provide a single view of a patient's full medical history for healthcare professionals.

    Whilst some of the platforms they use are old (.NET 2.0, Delphi), they do a pretty decent job under pretty tight budgetary constraints.

  5. clyde666

    the real end game

    Is this one of these reports designed to bad-mouth a system which can later be "saved" by influx of money - i.e. privatisation ???

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder

    What the manager:programmer ratio looks like on this project

  7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    “The fact that NHS Wales still refers to its digital programme as 'Informatics' is emblematic of how dated its approach is.”

    I raised an eye-brow at that too. Using last year's buzzword is bad; using last century's....

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