The ban on buying fax machines takes effect from
January 2019. They will be phased out by 31 March 2020.
NHS organisations will be monitored on a quarterly
basis until they declare themselves ‘fax free’.
A freedom of information request revealed in July
that more than 8,000
fax machines are still being used by the NHS in
England
From April, NHS organisations will be required to use
modern communication methods, such as secure email, to
improve patient safety and cyber security.
It is part of the Health and Social Care
Secretary’s tech vision,
to modernise the health service and make it easier for
NHS organisations to introduce innovative technologies.
Digital services and IT systems will soon have to meet
a clear set of open standards to ensure they can talk
to each other across organisational boundaries and can
be continuously upgraded.
Any system that does not meet these standards will be
phased out and the government will look to end
contracts with providers who do not understand these
principles for the health and care sector.
Richard Corbridge, Chief Digital and Information
Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospital, said:
Turning off the fax is a step in the delivery of
integrated care and a leap forward in putting
healthcare information in the right hands every time
it is needed.
We don’t underestimate the enormity of the challenge
to remove all our machines in such a short time
frame, but we simply cannot afford to continue living
in the dark ages.
The ‘axe the fax’ campaign aims to empower staff
rather than disarm them and so far the feedback has
been positive – staff are recognising that on the one
hand we have hugely innovative technology being
implemented in the trust and on the other we have
technology that hasn’t existed for decades in other
industries.
Richard Kerr, Chair of the Royal College of Surgeons
Commission on the Future of Surgery, said:
Earlier this year, work undertaken for the RCS’s
Commission on the Future of Surgery revealed that NHS
hospital trusts own over 8,000 fax machines. This is
absurd.
Advances in artificial intelligence, genomics and
imaging for healthcare promise exciting benefits for
patients. As these digital technologies begin to play
a bigger part in how we deliver healthcare it is
crucial that we invest in better ways of
communicating the vast amount of patient information
that is going to be generated.
Most other organisations scrapped fax machines in the
early 2000s and it is high time the NHS caught up.
The RCS supports the ban on fax machines that will
come into place in March 2020.
Since we published our data on NHS fax machines,
we’ve seen a number of trusts pledge to ‘axe the
fax’. They have proved that, with the right will and
support, it is possible to modernise NHS
communications.
