Barking still struggling with PAS issues

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust is in discussions with System C about its Medway patient administration system, as problems with its deployment are still unresolved.

EHI reported last month that the trust had paused planned further go-lives of the Medway maternity, A&E and order communications modules because of unresolved issues with the initial go-live, in particular with capturing and reporting data.

The trust went live with the PAS in December last year, as it was keen to deploy a new system before the support contract for its legacy, McKesson Totalcare PAS expired in March.

System C won the contract to replace the PAS for half of the 28 trusts running the old McKesson system.

The trust said that one of the main reasons it is experiencing problems is that it went live with the system before it was ready, because of the “extremely tight timescales” imposed by System C’s commitments to deploy at other trusts.

 Its most recent board papers, prepared for a June meeting, say that because of the timescales, the system “was less customised to the trust’s way of working” and the trust “had got what it asked for, not what it wanted or needed.”

“Although similar systems were deployed in other NHS trusts, in effect each was a bespoke system and Barking, Havering and Redbridge had a less customised system than others. One trust’s system was not transferrable to another,” the board papers say.

Last month, Barking said it had deployed the system before undertaking proper “user acceptance testing,” which has also caused problems.

The update to the June board meeting says the situation is causing frustration for staff and is having a “significant impact on the trust’s ability to deliver some services efficiently, especially outpatients’ clinics.”

“Staff had said they ‘used to drive a car and now they drive a milk float’ the system was so slow,” one member of the public said during the meeting, according to the board papers.

“Consultants were unable to forward plan – the told the patients they needed to be seen in two weeks but the clinics were already full.

“Patients were incredibly inconvenienced, they turned up for appointments that had been cancelled, often their records were missing and they had to pay more in car parking charges because of longer waits.”

Responding to questions raised in the trust’s board meeting, Steve Russell, Barking’s improvement director, said he is aware the situation is causing frustration for staff.

The trust is also experiencing issues with the business intelligence product, mainly around problems with data capture.

The trust is implementing a data validation project to solve these issues. One problem is that some of the data that was transferred to the Medway PAS was incorrect.

“There remained a lot of work to do around data cleansing and rebuilding clinics. The trust had stopped reporting performance against the 18 week referral to treatment time as the system did not support capture and reporting of the data,” say the board papers.

The trust was one of seven that failed to report its waiting times data to NHS England for March; when the NHS waiting list neared 3m for the first time in several years. NHS England confirmed the trust had not submitted any referral to treatment pathway data to the centre.

In a joint statement to EHI, the trust and System C said it remains a priority to making sure the system “meets the requirements of the trust”.

“We have continued to work together and are about to start the process of testing upgrades to the system to resolve the current issues, many of which were identified at the outset,” said the statement.

 “The trust and System C continue to have a collaborative relationship, and we are committed to working together to ensure that the remaining issues are addressed speedily so that the trust is able to obtain the anticipated benefits from the system.  “

 System C, which previously was a McKesson company bought by the supplier in 2011, was recently sold alongside most of McKesson’s UK health operations to an American private equity firm Symphony.