Wales invests £3m in sharing documents

The Welsh Government has announced that £3 million will be spent on rolling out a system to enable hospital staff and GPs to share information, including tests and clinical correspondence.

The Emergency Department Clinical Information Management Scheme is the latest element of Wales’ plan to create a suite of national IT systems for its health service to be given the go-ahead by ministers.

It will be introduced in the Abertawe Bro Morgannwyg and Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Boards initially; but all health boards will be expected to adopt the system eventually.

Health and social services minister Mark Drakeford said in a statement: “The development of the Emergency Department Clinical Information System is a major step forward, which will eventually allow information sharing across all emergency departments and minor injuries units across Wales.

“It will support service re-design by allowing electronic patient information to be shared across NHS Wales, allowing improved integration and co-ordination of services.”

 Although it is set-up differently, and no longer runs an internal market, Wales’ NHS faces many of the same issues as the NHS in England when it comes to dealing with an ageing population, living with a burden of chronic ill health, on a tight budget.

In 2013, the Welsh Government issued a ‘Together for Health’ plan to deliver a “high quality and sustainable services and improved patient benefits” over five years.

The plan includes investment in digital technologies, building on an IT strategy issued in 2012, which itself built on the foundations of a national infrastructure, patient administration system, nationally-procured digital imaging and lab systems, and programmes to create e-referral and summary record systems.

Among other developments, the strategy called for “an integrated view of the whole health record to authorised users.”

It said this should be created by turning the 100 million documents generated by the NHS in Wales each year into a “usable record” to which specialist systems could contribute, without having to be integrated with each other.

It is this ambition that the Welsh Government is now taking forward, using some of an additional £4.9 million of capital funding that has just been found for the health service.

Finance minister and former health minister Jane Hutt said: “Investing in our health service is a priority for this government.

"The additional investment were are announcing will help to support the reconfiguration of our health services and help to make sure that they are sustainable, efficient and affordable in the long term.”