NHS IT directors: Spending cuts will be detrimental to patient care

Senior management, big data and skills gaps are all obstacles for NHS IT

IT spending cuts of 12 per cent per year in the NHS will have a severe impact on patients' care and experience, according to a survey of 100 NHS IT directors.

The survey, commissioned by IT services company 2e2, found that 87 per cent of the respondents said they were under pressure to cut costs to achieve the government's aim to save £20bn from the NHS budget by 2014-15.

According to 2e2, this translates to a 4 per cent saving per year across the NHS as a whole, and IT departments are being hit hardest as each needs to make an average saving of 10 per cent in 2012 and 12 per cent each subsequent year until 2015.

"Not only do they need to make large savings; they are also tasked with providing the foundations to help improve healthcare standards through supplying more patient-centric services and giving clinicians more face-time with patients," said head of healthcare at 2e2, Adam Kamruddin.

Kamruddin explained that for IT to become a vital part of providing healthcare it would require more investment, and 71 per cent of IT directors believed that their current IT infrastructure is not capable of supporting these objectives.

"Pairing this with the need to cut costs makes for a tricky balancing act; 93 per cent of IT directors are concerned that cutting IT costs will have a negative impact on both patient care and experience," he said.

The challenge could be made greater because of a lack of an underlying strategy: only 41 per cent of respondents had a clear strategic vision and roadmap for IT, while 61 per cent admitted needing more IT strategy and planning skills within their department.

One factor could be a lack of co-operation between IT and senior management, as 54 per cent of respondents believe that senior management does not understand how IT can be used to transform patient care.

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NHS IT directors: Spending cuts will be detrimental to patient care

Senior management, big data and skills gaps are all obstacles for NHS IT

Fifty three per cent of IT directors believed that the breakaway from the failed National Programme for IT (NPfIT) was a good decision and 55 per cent said they would now be able to work with service providers that better meet their needs.

On the downside, 67 per cent said that because of the breakup, they would need extra resources and skills to deal with the increase and change in workload and 61 per cent of respondents believed they did not have sufficient training programmes in place to address these skills gaps, the most in demand of skills being in application management, infrastructure management and project management.

The survey also found that new technologies were relatively untouched by NHS IT departments. Only 48 per cent of respondents had developed a mobile working strategy, 71 per cent do not even have systems in place that enable phone calls to be routed to workers regardless of location, and 75 per cent stated that their organisation isn't gaining as much value as it could from analysing patient data.

But perhaps adopting new technologies would allow NHS IT departments to reduce costs.

In May, James Norman, IT director of Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, told Computing that a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy would result in job losses and help to meet his cost reduction targets.

Only 45 per cent of organisations have plans to implement telehealth services in the next two years and when asked about shared services and obtaining a single patient view, 79 per cent of respondents don't have the in-house skills and resources to achieve such a goal and 56 per cent believe that it isn't a realistic or achievable target.

The concept of big data is also becoming a problem as 84 per cent of NHS IT directors said this growth is already causing storage and management challenges and that both local area and wide area networks are struggling to deal with increasingly large data files.