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Chief executive of Whittington Health, Dr Yi Mien Koh, explains to Jessica Fuhl that the biggest challenge to integration and efficiency is getting staff on board Whittington Health has ambitions plans for the future. It hopes to achieve foundation trust status by 2014 and its first step to ensure it made sufficient efficiency savings in order to do so was to fully integrate local community services with the hospital last year. In January it had reached 98% of its cost improvement programme (CIP) target for the financial year as a result. The integrated health organisation is a merger of the formerly...

Patient from Hell *** Vinegar asks whether progress was made on electronic records in 2011 and what we can expect in 2012 I bang on about the same topics again and again: the summary care record, hospital electronic patient records, telehealth, emails for patients, the 19th century attitudes of doctors' leaders and many clinicians. I apologise for being repetitive, but progress is glacially slow, and I feel it my solemn duty to point the finger of blame again and again. I would like to begin the new year by stock-taking. Was there any progress in 2011 on any of these fronts, and can we expect...

Primary care trust acts as lead commissioner for non-emergency 111 service in north-west of England NHS Blackpool is leading a procurement that will see the implementation of an NHS 111 non-emergency service offering patients NHS care and advice over the telephone and online in the north-west of England. The government has previously said that it would like the service in operation across England by April 2013 , combining functions currently provided by NHS Direct and local out-of-hours services. The aim is to make it easier for the public to access services that do not require an emergency 999...

Scottish government outlines plans to get patients more directly involved in their own healthcare by focusing on outcomes from eHealth technology Scotland's NHS will switch its focus from new technology projects, to the benefits and outcomes they deliver to healthcare professionals in helping them redesign and improve services, the Scottish government has said. The government's new eHealth strategy for 2011-2017 outlines a number of key priorities to help patients get more engaged with the health service. These include: • The development of a national multi-channel strategy on 'citizen...