ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the progress of the national programme after five years from a socio-technical perspective. After five years of 'rolling out' the National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) to the National Health Service (NHS) trusts the author should be in a position to gauge what kind of process of assimilating the new technical systems into existing healthcare practices is occurring. Socio-technical systems thinking provides a perspective on the operational reality of delivering work on a daily basis in organisations that emphasises the need for close integration of the human and technical resources that gets the work done. The National Audit Office report that 'in 2005 the implementation of the Summary Care Record was deferred by two years on the grounds of complexity and the need for wider consultation, for example, on patient confidentiality issues'. The Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) collects stores and communicates electronic X-ray and other forms of medical images.