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NHS England welcomes additional £250 million to the Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards Technology Fund

NHS England has today welcomed the £250m extension to the ‘Safer Hospital, Safer Wards’ Technology Fund, increasing its value to over £500m to help patients get better and safer care.

The fund is available to NHS Trusts to support the widespread adoption of modern, safe electronic record-keeping, replacing outdated paper based systems for patient notes and prescriptions with integrated digital care records (IDCRs).

The ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards’ Fund will also help to deliver NHS England’s commitment to allow everyone to book GP appointments and order repeat prescriptions online by March 2015.   The money will be spent on digital systems that connect across different health and care organisations, meaning:

  • doctors, nurses and social care professionals in accident and emergency can access patients’ complete medical details, giving patients personal and effective treatment with full knowledge of their medical and care history;
  • more effective discharge from hospitals into the community as health and care professionals have access to information on the individual needs of patients;
  • health and care professionals will have this information at their fingertips so can spend more time seeing patients and less time filling in paperwork;
  • errors will be reduced, as it will stop drugs being prescribed incorrectly because patients’ paper notes have been lost.

Tim Kelsey, National Director for Patients and Information for NHS England said:

”We are delighted with the additional funding for the ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards’ Technology Fund to help patients get better and safer care.

“A single patient record will help to make the patient journey from hospital to home seamless, giving professionals from different health and care organisations access to information when they need it most, without patients having to repeat themselves every time they speak to a different doctor, nurse or care professional.

“This extra funding is great news for the NHS and great news for patients.”

NHS England is currently evaluating the first stage of the ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards’ Fund and expects to announce how the initial funding has been awarded at the end of October.

6 comments

  1. Tim Anderson says:

    Hi,

    would it be possible to let me know where to find information on the closing dates for the extra £250million funds announced in September 2013?

    Regards,

    Tim Anderson

  2. steve says:

    In the spirit of transparency are the winning bids going to be published for all to see?
    I would be interested in who was successful, the bid amount submitted and how much money was awarded.
    This may sound like a FOI request, but I thought I would ask anyway.
    Many thanks.

  3. Erin Povey says:

    How do we go about accessing this fund on behalf of our trust

  4. Nick says:

    Throughout this item refers to A+E. is this in error what actually is needed is access to patients records across Primary and Secondary Care and Social Care. For instance if a person has a learning disability which is recorded in GP or social care notes but the patient is treated in hospital knowlegde of their LD is not routine. This needs changing and has been recommended a number of times in national reports (e.g. Healthcare for All 2008, CIPOLD 2013). Is this measure going to address this or only part resolve things?

  5. Jesus Enriquez Castillo says:

    i’d like to know more information about this topic