Three quarters of trusts in England that responded to a survey by The BMJ are still reliant on paper patient notes and drug charts, despite progress towards electronic records and prescribing.
The results came in just as an expert panel convened by a House of Commons committee concluded that the UK government had failed to meet a key target to eliminate paper prescribing in hospitals and to introduce digital or electronic prescribing across the entire NHS by 2024.
NHS figures from May this year show that 88% of trusts in England now have EPRs. Yet The BMJ's survey shows that paper notes remain prevalent. What's more, the quantity of paper generated by trusts can be staggering; Barking, Havering, and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust estimates that it creates 25 million pages of A4 a year, for example.
Related StoriesThe use of electronic prescribing can also cut medication errors by 30% compared with paper prescribing, government figures show. Electronic prescribing "definitely is safer," says Linda Karlberg, a GP trainee in Edinburgh, who has spent the past two years in a paper heavy trust. A 2021 report by the Institution of Technology and Engineering, for example, found a lack of agreed technology standards, issues around patients' consent on how data can be used, and a lack of the appropriate digital skills are all holding the NHS back from better interoperability between electronic systems.
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