- Smart Healthcare, Thursday 19 November 2009 12.22 GMT
Kingston Hospital NHS Trust said that it has trained its staff ready for the launch the National Programme for IT approved Cerner's patient record system on 30 November 2009. If successful, it will be the first trust in London to go live with the NHS Care Records Service (CRS) system since Royal Free Hampstead's troubled adoption in June 2008.
"Trials and practices have taught us some valuable lessons and have, as always expected, indicated some additional work which needed to be done on the technical side," said a trust spokesperson. "This work is being carried out and further technical rehearsals are scheduled."
He added, however, that "as a result of the Department of Health's warnings on the rise of swine flu, the trust has taken the responsible action of modelling the trajectory of swine flu and its affect on staff, and how that would impact on the introduction of CRS during this predicted period".
Introduction of CRS, which will eventually enable NHS professionals to access patient records across England, was expected to start in 2004, along with other elements of the national programme, such as the N3 broadband network and picture archiving and communications systems.
Delays have been attributed to problems with software packages and a lack of definition about access levels and security standards.
Cerner says that Millennium has more than 29,000 unique users across the NHS at 17 live sites.
