More than half of staff say EPRs make their job harder
More than half of NHS staff using an electronic patient record system say it made their job harder and they lacked necessary training, a survey has found.
The Health Foundation has published a report on staff experience of electronic patient records (EPR). A survey for the work found 53% said the introduction of an EPR had made their work more difficult.
A third of respondents said they thought EPR systems were not currently working well, but that they could see there would be benefits in future.
Common reported problems included differences between systems, making work more complicated, a lack of real-time support when issues occurred, and a lack of training to help staff use systems. The findings mirror the conclusions drawn in the 10-Year Health Plan that “Clinical systems often provide a poor and inefficient user experience requiring multiple clicks to set the next step in the care process.”
Only 46% of the 1,725 respondents to the Health Foundation’s survey said they had received basic training on how to use their EPR system, while just 28% said they had received additional training on how to gain insights from EPR data.
Alex Lawrence, an improvement fellow at the Health Foundation and one of the report’s authors, said that NHS staff “are experiencing barriers and… frustrations” with using EPRs, but that overall, they “do feel positively about these systems”.
She said: “[Staff] either think that [EPRs] are delivering value now or they’re going to deliver value in the future. They think they have improved safety; they think they have improved care.
“That positivity and that momentum is not going to last forever and needs to be capitalised on as soon as possible. The longer these frustrations continue, the more that positivity is going to be eroded, and at the moment, there’s a lot that could be done to improve these systems.”
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Source: HSJ, 24 March 2026
Related reading on the hub:
- HSSIB Investigation Report: Patient safety issues associated with electronic patient record (EPR) systems – a thematic review
- Patient safety and electronic patient record systems: Patient Safety Learning’s response to HSSIB report
- Electronic patient record systems: Putting patient safety at the heart of implementation