A hospitals trust which provides acute services to thousands of people across Berkshire is considering leaving the £12.4 billion National Health Service IT programme to ensure that it gets the patient record systems it needs.
The Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust is now looking at setting up its own IT system for maintaining medical records after southern region contractor Fujitsu announced it was leaving the project.
“If we want to be a forward-looking trust we need a decent IT system,” said Royal Berkshire’s chairman, Colin MacLean. “We have been waiting for this to happen for a while and so the board has already been looking at the options in case we needed to go somewhere else.
“Plan A was to try to work with the national programme, Plan B was to start propping up our own IT systems and to continue working with the national programme, and just over six months ago we were made aware that we needed to start thinking about a Plan C to go out on our own.”
The Royal Berkshire Trust provides acute hospital services to the people of West Berkshire from three sites: the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, West Berkshire Community Hospital near Newbury, and the Prince Charles Eye Unit in Windsor.
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