Prisons create central health database
Kable
Published: 23 Aug 2004 15:05 BST
South West Dorset Primary Care Trust (SWDPCT) is to become the first primary care organisation involved in linking prisons with a centralised clinical system, an official told Government Computing News on 20 August, 2004.
The move is part of the initiative to transfer the healthcare of prison inmates to primary care trusts throughout England and Wales. One element of this is to create an electronic patient record for inmates in place of the existing paper record.
Project manager Robert Dawson said: "The biggest problem we have is to build a clinical record that follows prisoners around the system, which is quite difficult. The paper record is meant to go where the prisoner goes but this does not always happen.
"We want a central database with an electronic patient record, which should ensure continuity of clinical care."
The trust is in the first wave of PCTs to take on the healthcare of prisoners, and is the first to implement a system of this kind. It has signed a deal with clinical software systems provider The Phoenix Partnership (TPP) to use its SystmOne Prison software to manage records at HM Prisons Verne, The Weare, Portland, Dorchester and Guy's Marsh in Dorset and Shepton Mallet in Somerset. The six prisons house approximately 2,000 prisoners.
Dawson said that information collected on the prison systems could be transferred to GP systems or the future National Care Record System, or taken from either of these for the prison system, but only with the consent of the patient.
The system includes biometric security for practitioners logging on and signing medication. Dawson said this is more suitable than passwords for locum doctors, who often do not enter prisons for weeks but between them provide most of the healthcare.
The system is scheduled to go live in the first prison in mid September, and should be running in all six by the end of the year.
"The biggest difficulty is migrating staff from a paper based service to a computer model," Dawson said, adding that there is a training programme in place.
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