CRS delayed MRSA patients being isolated

Problems with the Care Records System installed at Buckingham Hospitals NHS Trust resulted in delays to potentially infectious patients with MRSA not being isolated.

The problem arose as after the new system was turned on historic infection control alerts then had to be manually entered onto the system in the six weeks following go-live

The trust says that between March and July this year potentially infectious patients with MRSA were not isolated for between two and 17 days, because of problems with the Cerner-supplied CRS recently installed at the trust by Fujitsu under the NHS IT programme.

Isolation of patients with infections MRSA forms part of the standard procedure to reduce the spread of hospital acquired infections (HAIs).

Buckingham was one of the first trusts in the South to implement the Cerner Millennium CRS system provided by Fujitsu. The trust’s Wycombe and Amersham sites went live with the system in September 2006. Implementation at Stoke Mandeville Hospital (SMH), also part of the trust, has been postponed until problems with the CRS can be resolved.

Trust board papers state: “The historical MRSA infection alerts needed to be put onto the CRS system manually following ‘go live’. This took approximately six weeks to do during which time there was a possibility that some MRSA positive patients may have slipped through undetected if medical notes were not available.”

The papers add: “There have been several other problems with the system which have resulted in a small number of patients not being isolated promptly. Solutions to these problems are currently being worked on. Implementation on the SMH site was postponed in order to resolve some of the problems the trust has experienced with CRS on the W&A sites first.”

The trust has also reported information governance concerns about the inability to audit the use of CRS system supplied, meaning that the trust is unable to track the use of the system. Trust papers say there are “concerns about no facility to audit the use / inappropriate use of the system, of data sharing and of consent”.