Nuffield’s IT upgrade lengthened waiting times

Details of the problems caused by the implementation of a new computer system at Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxfordshire, were yesterday reported to include increased waiting list times for patients.

According to the Sunday Times, the implementation of the Cerner Millennium system by Fujitsu at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust in Oxford, a small specialist orthopaedic hospital, led to problems including computer crashes, misplaced data and increased waits for some patients.

Nuffield was the pilot site for the £6.2bn centrally funded NHS IT programme in the South of England. In January 2004, the Department of Health awarded an £896m contract to Fujitsu to upgrade NHS IT systems in the South, with the clinical software to be supplied by US firm IDX – which was also to supply the software for NHS IT upgrades in London.

In June 2005 Fujitsu announced that it was to replace IDX as its main sub-contractor with another US clinical software supplier, Cerner. Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, became the test bed for the Cerner system, with NHS Connecting for Health demanding that the system go ‘live’ by the end of December 2005.

According to the Sunday Times report, based on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, in December 2005, just 12 people were waiting more than six months for an operation in England. But from December the number of people on waiting lists longer than six months began rising. Within a few weeks more than 100 people in England were waiting longer than six months, most of them at the Nuffield.

The problems at the Nuffield were said to be such that hospital managers could not produce accurate reports for the Department of Health on patients waiting to be treated.

Staff using the new IT system were also said to be unable to establish which patients had been waiting the longest and the numbers kept climbing.

The paper reported that figures from the hospital show that it repeatedly breached the government’s key target of keeping no patient waiting longer than six months for an operation.

On 31 March, the number of patients waiting longer than six months for an operation was 123, out of a national total of 199 patients.

As a result the hospital, a high performer in most areas, temporarily fell to the bottom of the national league table for waiting times for patients.

The report quoted an NHS CfH spokesperson saying that the old computer systems at the Nuffield were in a state of near-collapse, though acknowledging the new system had initially caused problems. “It did cause disruptions to some patients, for which we are sorry.”