Scotland considering buying replacement GP system

The Scottish Executive Health Department (SEHD) is considering the procurement of an alternative IT system for Scottish GPs.

Dr Stuart Scott, chair of the BMA’s Scottish General Practitioner Committee’s IT sub-committee, told EHI Primary Care that the SEHD are discussing the possible procurement of an alternative system with the SGPC and the RCGP.

He added: ‘Initial agreements have been reached on capital expenditure and discussions are on-going to consider the requirements for GP computing in the NHS.’

Dr Scott said the SGPC’s agreement with the Scottish Executive on choice of systems expired in October 2004 and SGPC was involved in discussions on agreement for a business case for any replacement.

About 85 per cent of Scottish GPs currently use GPASS, the official IT system for Scottish GPs provided by the Scottish Executive, but the system was criticised at the SGPC annual conference last year for failing GPs.

Last month SGPC wrote to GPASS over concerns about the roll out of the upgrade to GPASS 5.5.

Dr Scott added: ‘Some practices have reported significant problems which are now under investigation by GPASS.’

Bob Stoakes, head of communications for GPASS, told EHI Primary Care that about 300 5.5 upgrades had been released to practices in Scotland and returns giving feedback on the upgrade had been received from 100 sites.

He added: ‘Analysis of these figures would indicate that this was a successful upgrade and only a handful of practices have encountered difficulties with the upgrade. This figure is in line with previous upgrades.

‘Additionally, after investigating the practices that reported upgrade difficulties, we found that some reported incidents were not related to release 5.5 at all. Many of these issues related to local variations of system configurations.’

In the mean time GPASS is also investigating a problem at a Glasgow practice last month when the wrong prescription was issued to a patient and the medication was dispensed before the error was noticed.

John McIldowie, practice manager at the C Wing practice in Woodside Health Centre, Glasgow, said the error occurred when two prescriptions went to be printed at the same time.

He added: ‘What happened was that patient A’s prescription was printed correctly but patient B’s prescription was wrongly printed with patient A’s medication. We were very fortunate because the patient’s son came back and asked why his father had been given these different drugs.’

Mr McIldowie said the error was the latest in a long list of concerns that practice has had with GPASS.

‘We want to move to another system and have put forward a business case to do so but have been told by our health board that we must wait. The SEHD may be looking at alternative GP systems but that doesn’t help me in the meantime.’

Mr Stoakes said GPASS had informed all its practices of the prescription error and checked a large number of other databases to see whether it had happened elsewhere. So far GPASS not found any other occurrence at any other practice.

He added: ‘The incident can only be recreated at times of extreme system load within the practice and we can only recreate it with the previously affected patient. We believe that this is an isolated incident, however we will continue to investigate the detailed circumstances under which the problem occurred.’