BT installs world-leading mental health systems across London
Sixty per cent of the capital’s mental health trusts have now implemented new IT systems as part of a London-wide NHS IT upgrade.
BT, which is responsible for rolling out new IT across the capital across all care settings, has installed new systems in North East London, West London, South West London and St Georges, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey, and East London and City Mental Health Trusts.
The new centrally-based electronic system replaces a largely paper-based system and is designed to make it much simpler and faster for clinicians to access data, update assessments or schedule an appointment.
Information will follow the patient so that it is available wherever and whenever it is needed. For the first time, patient information will be mobile - as patients are themselves - and not remain in filing stores in the buildings where treatment or care has been received.
The system is an important building block of the NHS National Programme for IT - the world’s largest civilian IT project. In the capital, the Strategic Health Authority, NHS London and BT are working with trusts and primary care trusts to deliver the London element of the project, known as the NHS London Programme for IT (LPfIT).
Clinicians are benefiting from the switch from paper to electronic records which they say is improving patient care by ensuring that they have accurate, up-to-date and secure information available around the clock - something that can be vital in an emergency.
Dr Hashim Reza, consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust - one of the first mental health trusts in London to have completed a trust-wide switch to electronic records - said: “The London mental healthcare community now has a computerised patient record system that is as good as any in the world. It is helping clinicians to provide the best care to our patients by giving them the information they need at their fingertips, when and where they need it.
“The true beneficiaries of this project are patients and it is heartening that these advances are taking place in the mental health sector which is so often at the back of the queue.
Paul White, chief executive of BT’s London programme, said: “I’m delighted with the progress BT has made in mental health with the deployment of CSE Servelec’s RiO system. This has already brought tangible benefits to patients and the people who care for them.
“It builds on our existing achievements in London where we have now delivered significant capability to 75 per cent of trusts. I am delighted at the solid progress that has been made.”
