George Eliot NHS Trust

In July 2006, the hospital was among the first wave of Trusts within the NHS to be designated a ‘Turnaround Trust’ because of its inability to balance its finances. In danger of being replaced, the George Eliot put in place a wide ranging plan to establish financial stability and rapid operational recovery. As part of this plan a new Board and a new Executive team were appointed who rapidly came to the conclusion that accessibility to and analysis of management information was critical to the recovery process. James Norman, newly appointed as Associate Director of Information and Performance, was duly tasked with delivering an improved Information Management system.

The challenge

As part of his initial review, James undertook a study of current systems and processes.
‘I was faced with a range of major issues,’ said James, ‘not least that data was being collected across disparate databases from a variety of data sources and systems. Reporting from a live system meant that
when data was presented to use in the Trust it was impossible to know if the data was up to date as it couldn’t be compared with previous reports. This led to the data being considered unreliable and on occasion confusing,’ added James.
‘I was faced with a fundamental question – how was I going to get commitment to invest in a major IT infrastructure and software upgrade when we were facing severe financial pressure and low morale amongst staff,’ said James. ‘I also had to take into account the imminent delivery of a new Patient Administration System driven by Connecting for Health.’

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