NHS information strategy and its impact on child health.

Paediatricians need to know what local and national information strategy is about so that they are included in the debates taking place at both levels and secondly because the possession of relevant and accurate information about the child health services is becoming vital in the fight for a share of limited NHS resources. The NHS has an Information Management Group as part of the executive which has produced an information management and technology (IM and T) strategy. The basic tenet of the strategy is that patient care is central and the vision is to 'To support better care and communications through appropriate use ofIM and T'. The belief is that this should allow better targeting of resources and lead to improvements in efficiency of services.' The thrust of the strategy is to provide person based information systems holding secure and confidential data. Management and administrative data is to be obtained from clinical operational systems (and not the other way round as is often the case at present). The infrastructure would allow information to be shared across the NHS in an integrated way. The vision is eventually to produce an electronic patient record with links between the whole range ofhospital and community service providers and internally to support and laboratory services. Included in this strategy is the development of a new NHS number, a central administrative register, a thesaurus of clinical terms, and standards for intercommunication and confidentiality. Some of these developments and their impact on child health services are reviewed below.