Gov Chief: Hospital IT getting crisis support

Monday 06 April 2020

The hospital’s creaking IT systems have received emergency surgery and are getting “round-the-clock” support to help sustain them through the pressures of the covid-19 crisis, the government's Chief Executive has said.

According to Charlie Parker, upgrades to hospital systems are being “prioritised” in light of the current health emergency.

“We have expanded the network and, working closely with JT, we’ve managed to ensure that we have created some extra back-up facilities as well. But I’ll be under no illusion it is a challenging situation which is requiring round-the-clock maintenance by our colleagues in modernisation and digital,” he said following questions from Express.

Video: Chief Executive Charlie Parker made the comments at a press conference on Friday.

The island’s most senior civil servant had previously described IT across the public sector as “woeful”.

Some of the systems are more than 10 years old, and officials have had to order second-hand parts in order to sustain it.

The  data management and paging systems at the Jersey General Hospital - which was last year revealed to have run up a £32m physical maintenance backlog - are no exception to this, also operating in a legacy digital environment.

Mr Parker said, however, that he was “confident at the moment that the situation is in hand”.

Pictured: The Chief Executive said he was "confident" that the hospital would be able to cope with the demands placed on its systems.

His comments came during a press conference on Friday, in which Express also grilled the island’s most senior civil servant on staffing levels across the health service. 

In late 2018, a year-long government-wide freeze was placed on recruitment to help plug a forecast £30m black hole in the public purse.

At the time, the public sector was carrying around 600 vacancies, including within the health service, which between 2016 and 2019 spent nearly £10m on UK agency staff. 

The move led to concerns about the impact on the health service at times of high demand.

Asked by Express whether this decision was regretted in the current context, particularly as retired doctors and nurses were now being drafted in to help, Mr Parker replied: “Clearly, nobody across the world would have foreseen, just two months ago, the impact of corona virus so I think it would be difficult for any organisation to have been able to have staffed up, trained and got specialist medical personnel who are very scarce resources now across the world in place.”

However, he added that a number of measures to mitigate staffing issues had been put in place.

“What we have done, though, is that we have stopped all but emergency health work. We have been spending the time recently retraining people in the areas that we believe are going to be critical in order to be able deal with the health challenges that are coming in the forthcoming weeks and months. And that we have also been working with our colleagues in GPs to prepare for them to be able to come in and work under the support and management of the Health and Community Services structure," Mr Parker explained.

“In so doing, we are all pulling together in order to be able to provide what I hope will be as good a service as we can. But let’s be honest, the volume and numbers that we are expecting and have been seen elsewhere across Europe will be a challenge for anybody. And that’s why I made the points that I did where I thanked colleagues for the work that they’ve been doing to date.

"So, where necessary we will backfill support for the medical side whether that’s putting people in to help with portering or general duties where people may or may not have been suffering from corona virus. Where we put colleagues in place to help with transportation and movement of patients and we’ve been training them up; where we’ve used St. Johns Ambulance to be able to ensure that we provide additional ambulatory capability - these are all the sorts of planning that you put into place when you have an emergency ahead.

“So, I hope that will give islanders the reassurance that we’re not just sitting there waiting for the pandemic to come to us, we’re preparing actively to ensure that we deal with the challenges ahead.”