Twenty-five years after the government first pushed to digitise the NHS, only around one in four hospital trusts in England is using fully electronic systems for clinical record-keeping.
Around three quarters of NHS trusts still use paper records in some form, according to a report published by The BMJ — a figure that includes trusts using hybrid paper-and-electronic systems (reportedly 71%) as well as the small proportion using paper only (around 4%), rather than exclusively paper-only trusts. The finding comes a quarter of a century after Whitehall’s first serious attempt to move the health service away from paper-based administration — a timeline that puts the scale of the gap into sharp relief.
Only about a quarter of hospital trusts have made the full switch to electronic clinical records, The BMJ found. That means most NHS hospitals are still writing, filing, and retrieving patient information by hand — or through a patchwork of part-digital, part-paper systems.
For patients in Kent, that matters. Trusts such as Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust and East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust serve hundreds of thousands of people across the county. Where paper records remain in use, there are well-documented risks around legibility, lost notes, and delays when patients move between departments or hospitals.
But the picture isn’t uniform. Some trusts are further along than others, and the shift to fully electronic systems is ongoing across the NHS.
The BMJ has not specified which individual trusts are fully digital and which are not, so it is not possible to say precisely where Kent’s hospitals sit within that breakdown.
What This Means for Patients
If you’re being treated at an NHS hospital in Kent and want to understand how your records are managed, you can ask your care team directly. Patients have the right to access their own health records under UK law.
For general NHS queries, call NHS 111 (available 24 hours a day, seven days a week). In a medical emergency, call 999.
Source: @bmj_latest