Going paperless: Journey to a better way of working

摘要

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust is a multi-site organisation, with five hospitals in Ashford, Canterbury, Margate, Dover and Folkestone. It employs 6,722 employees (whole-time equivalent) and serves a population of around 759,000 people1. Its annual turnover is nearly £500 million (2012 figures). Like any large occupational health (OH) department covering several sites over a wide geographical area, we were experiencing problems in relation to the management of the paper-based files of our client base (the term 'clients' is preferred as it covers all workers -both trust employees and contract workers).This was partly due to the need to cover increasing numbers of outreach clinics with our nursing team, and exacerbated by a more mobile client base and the need for more flexible access to OH records. The multi-site paper-based system also created data protection issues due to the need to transfer notes and take them away from the main site for outreach clinics. In 2012, therefore, the trust decided to undertake an 'options appraisal' to consider the benefits and pitfalls of introducing a paperless client record keeping system.This article explains what happened, and what lessons were learnt.