Choose and Book’s problems continue

Technical problems caused the national Choose and Book service to be unavailable for most of Tuesday 3 January, the day that Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt announced that patient choice was now a reality across the NHS.

The embarrassing technical failure – which resulted in the service being unavailable for most of the day – was the second time in less than two weeks that Choose and Book had been unavailable to NHS users for a protracted period.

E-Health Insider readers first alerted EHI to the unavailability of the flagship e-booking service run by Atos, with the problem quickly acknowledged by NHS Connecting for Health (CfH). 

A spokesperson for CfH told EHI: "We can confirm that there was a service interruption with Choose and Book on 3 January. The system is now up and running, but was unavailable for a large part of the working day."

The spokesperson said the Department of Health’s IT agency was now "investigating the cause of the interruption with our suppliers".

On 3 January health secretary said "Choice is now a reality in the NHS". Hewitt continued: “There are a range of ways in which patients will access information and book their appointment – including through the new Choose and Book computer system, over the phone, or using the internet."

Originally due to have been fully implemented by the end of December 2005 the Department of Health is now not expecting the national Choose and Book service to be completed until December 2006.

This week’s outage of the late-running Choose and Book service follows serious problems with the NHS Spine at the end of 2005. These resulted in Choose and Book being unavailable to many NHS users on 22 December.

Some GPs using the system have complained of recurrent difficulties with the technology, including time taken to use, the usability of the first release of the software, slow response times and reliability

The CfH spokesperson added: "We acknowledge this will have caused frustration and inconvenience but GPs are still able to make referrals “manually” – as they have traditionally done – in these circumstances."

CfH said that over the past six months the Choose and Book service has operated with over 99.8 per cent reliability.

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