The NHS needs more and more modern IT is the broad conclusion of the recent 2016 Wachter Report to the UK Department of Health. We all live in a culture where this claim seems self-evident: for instance, it is obvious that the NHS is years behind most patients’ and doctors’ use of apps and social media, and the gap is only getting worse.
Yet this popular view is fundamentally muddled. In fact IT plays a critical part in NHS inefficiency and avoidable patient harm. Merely having more will be counter-productive. A recent criminal case over the corruption of patient data serves as a good example of our widespread inability to understand, provide, use or develop dependable IT.
This talk will explain key problems with IT and go some way to explaining why hospital preventable error has become the UK’s unacknowledged third biggest killer (close after cancer and heart disease) – and that thinking more clearly about healthcare IT will have a dramatic impact.
This talk will be of interest to patients, potential patients (i.e., all of us), all clinicians, and particularly programmers who could deliver the improved IT that is needed. The talk itself aims to be interesting to general audiences, but experts in formal methods and human factors will recognise the underlying science.
This session will be led by Swansea University’s Prof. Harold Thimbleby CEng FIET FRCPE FLSW HonFRSA HonFRCP. For more information, visit http://harold.thimbleby.net or http://mitpress.com/presson
Refreshments will be served from 3pm in the Kilburn Staff Common room for informal talks.