'Operating in the Stone Age': NHS Staff's Daily Struggle With Outdated Tech

The Financial Times: In the paediatric centre at one of London's largest hospitals, doctors are confounded each day by a ward computer that is not connected to a printer. The computer is used for managing the daily list of patients. Doctors can only access and update the list, using one shared account. So twice a day, two doctors on the ward said one of them had to log in to this computer, update the patient list, send the list to themselves via NHS email, and then log in to another nearby computer to print it off for the team. 'I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the Stone Age,' said one paediatrician on the ward.

Tackling the frustrating delays caused by outdated technology [Editor's note: non-paywalled link] is one of health secretary Wes Streeting and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's core missions, having vowed to shift the service 'from an analogue to a digital NHS.' The monumental task of moving the world's largest publicly funded health service into the digital age is not lost on doctors working on the frontline of the NHS. While many sectors of the economy have been 'radically reshaped' by technology in recent years, a landmark report into the state of the health service in England last month concluded that the NHS stood 'in the foothills of digital transformation.'

But doctors and nurses point out that the basic infrastructure needs to be brought up to a minimum standard, given significant regional variations between hospitals, before politicians extol the virtues of cutting-edge tech. 'Some of us just want the printers to work,' noted one NHS hospital doctor. 'The complete flip-a-coin nature of how equipped your hospital is is mind-boggling,' they added. 'I have worked in hospitals that are at least 12 years behind others.' A report published in 2022 by the British Medical Association, the UK's main doctors' union, estimated that doctors in England lost 13.5mn working hours a year as a consequence of 'inadequate IT systems and equipment.' One reason for the outdated infrastructure is that the country has spent almost $48bn less than its peers -- such as Germany, France, Australia -- on health assets since the 2010s, according to a government-commissioned study by Lord Ara Darzi last month.

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