NHS informatics director wants localised approach

Tuesday 11th October 2011

Katie Davis, the interim managing director of informatics at the UK National Health Service believes the organisation will not work if it maintains a "one size fits all" approach.

"We need to be able to recognise where there is a special local need for services which are different," she told a British Computer Society conference, as reported in the Guardian.

"People need to share information, and that implies that we need to do some pretty strong joining up in the future.

"Standards to simplify, standards to help us to communicate. Not standards to get in the way or confuse, but being thoughtful about standards is going to be very helpful to us in the future.

"We need to understand what are the correct levels of accreditation and assurance and when it's correct for that accreditation and assurance to be locally provided.

"We need a vibrant healthcare market place… strong suppliers who know what they are there to, and the NHS as a strong customer.

"Transparency is a way of helping things to work. Improving, ultimately, the care that the patient gets and the options available to them is critical.

"And, interestingly, a lot of the people in the system share the same information needs, and wouldn't it be great if we made that information available and then let people use it for whatever their needs are.

"This is not about making people's sensitive information available, but there are many more situations than we recognise when we can make information available.

"I feel hugely optimistic about the challenge front of us and that the NHS is modernising. It is great to see patients and clinicians being placed at the forefront of that agenda."

Department of Health

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