Sunak's plan to boost NHS staff 'will fail without an overhaul of IT systems'

Rishi Sunak plans to increase NHS staff by more than one million Photo: Simon Dawson/Number 10 Downing Street

Plan By Rishi Sunak Senior doctors have warned that increasing NHS staffing will fail to fix the health system unless there is a radical overhaul of its “archaic” IT systems.

Leaders of the Royal Colleges, which train and represent specialist doctors, told The Telegraph that the Prime Minister's moves to increase NHS staff by more than one million must be accompanied by sweeping changes to computer systems.

They stated that outdated systems waste countless hours of work and cause unnecessary duplication of x-rays. scans and blood tests.

Doctors believe the changes are crucial to improving the efficiency of health care, as well as eliminating unnecessary paperwork and NHS initiatives that distract medical staff from caring for patients.

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, numbering several thousand members in England, described existing computer systems used by doctors as «slow, tedious and unintuitive».

Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College's Department of Emergency Medicine, said the systems used in the NHS are «really poorly integrated», resulting in wasted time and research and sometimes jeopardizing patient safety.

0507 NHS staff expansion

Colleges have issued a warning after doctors attacked Steve Barclay, the health secretary, over a tweet in which he announced the development of a “bot assistant” that could be used to deliver drugs across hospitals.

They called for Mr Barclay to focus on existing IT technology and noted that some had to wait up to an hour for their computers to turn on at the start of their shift.

Doctors' concerns about IT provision in the National System health care are based on the fact that many doctors have to use multiple systems on the same computer at the same time, and hospital systems are generally not linked to GP office systems.

Their concerns about outdated systems were acknowledged by the government five years ago when Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, promised to «make archaic IT systems a thing of the past.»

Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said it would be «a missed opportunity and «potentially very wasteful» if NHS IT systems were not modernized at the same time as a significant increase in the size of the health service workforce.