Buckinghamshire trust to receive £71.2m for digital infrastructure

Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has received approval on funding from NHS England for £71.2 million investment in digital infrastructure over the next 10 years.

The trust is an integrated provider of acute hospital and community services for people living in Buckinghamshire and for some people in surrounding counties, which provides care to more than half a million patients every year.

Funding was approved by NHSE in October 2024 for the trust’s digital programme, which aims to remove legacy paper processes and modernise patient pathways to improve patient safety and increase service efficiency.

The programme will include the introduction of an electronic patient record (EPR) system, which will be implemented in phases over the next two years.

In a press release, published on 7 November 2024, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust says that the EPR “will provide doctors and clinical staff much greater flexibility to read and access patient records across different specialities”.

It adds: “For many patients this will reduce the need to relay symptoms, treatment history and medicines to multiple clinicians, multiple times.”

Neil Macdonald, chief executive at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “This is a huge amount of work for the trust over the next few years.

“It marks the biggest single investment in infrastructure we have made and will significantly improve the safety of our care by giving the clinicians both the data and the time they need with their patients.”

The trust says that its digital programme ties in with a national strategy, showcased in the government’s commitment in the Autumn Budget, announced on 30 October 2024, to provide funding for NHS technology and digital.

In October 2023, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust announced that it is streamlining surgical pathways and tackling waiting lists with a digital population health dashboard in collaboration with Graphnet Health.

The platform combines the trust’s surgical waiting lists with the Buckinghamshire Shared Care Record, which was launched in 2018 to share information between Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, Buckinghamshire County Council Social Care and 51 GP practices.