07 September 2007
TPP is next week hosting a workshop for SystmOne Prison users at its headquarters
in Leeds. The event will provide 45 healthcare professionals with the opportunity
to discuss the system with TPP's directors, software engineers and prison
specialists, in an open forum.
Customer Relationship Manager, Ben Ryan, says: "The aim of the workshop is to
find out if there are areas that we can improve upon as the demand for SystmOne
Prison increases. It's extremely useful for us to hear how the system is used
day-to-day and what developments could make prison staff's lives easier."
A SystmOne deployment to a prison health centre is very different to that of
a community GP practice. The prison starts the move from a very different starting
place: "They start from 19th century paper," says Mike Burrows, Project Facilitator,
for Northamptonshire Health Informatics. "It's almost Dickensian - they fill
in paper records and put them in the IMR (Inmate Medical Record). That just doesn't
fit with the way clinicians have come to feel clinical care is delivered."
IT is key to the modernisation of prison health care centres. SystmOne Prison
eases the burden of high-volume prisoner reception, transfer and release, offering
clinical and administrative support in a challenging environment. TPP is keen
to ensure that SystmOne Prison meets the needs of its users and is looking forward
to the feedback the workshop will bring.
Currently, 37 prisons use SystmOne with 5 more in deployment, which will take
the proportion of prisons in England and Wales using SystmOne to 29%, with demand
growing all the time.
TPP's Prison Specialist, Louis Elder, says: "One of the strengths of SystmOne
is undoubtedly its record-sharing capability, and the benefits of this will increase
with the number of units using the system. With SystmOne, a prisoner's patient
record can follow them easily from one establishment to another. With over 70,000
prisoner transfers occurring each year, SystmOne has the potential to save healthcare
units a lot of time, making the patient record available instantly and enabling
them to provide better care for their patients."
