The adoption of PACS by all acute trusts across England has been widely recognised as a great success story for the NHS. PACS is well embedded now in day-to-day clinical practice within hospitals and it's been estimated that over two million patients benefit from the technology each month.

Given the NHS's reliance on PACS it's not surprising that the national PACS programme is currently working with the trusts which received PACS and RIS (radiology information systems) via the local service providers (LSPs), the strategic health authorities and other stakeholders to address the issue of what will happen when the LSP contracts for PACS and RIS expire. This will be in June 2013 for all parts of the country except London, where the contract ends in June 2014.

This approach supports the wider NHS direction of putting the management of systems like PACS and RIS into the hands of local NHS organisations. The national PACS programme is now supporting trusts as they work to plan and implement their future PACS service provision in good time.

If you work in a trust and are involved in planning locally for these changes, access our growing range of information and resources designed to help you.

New!

• We are publishing regular updates aimed at NHS staff involved in planning for these changes locally. Access the latest update (10/04/12).

• Core requirements (2/3/12) (PDF, 1.2MB) - the national PACS programme has engaged with NHS colleagues to develop a set of core requirements for PACS, RIS and associated services.

  The document can be used by trusts to help them produce their own requirements and output-based specifications to use in local procurements. As they are core requirements, they are not guaranteed to be totally exhaustive, and it is also recognised that many of the requirements may either not be required by a trust, or may benefit from local tailoring. 

  The core requirements were pulled together from a range of sources, including the output-based specification used in the procurement of the local service provider contracts, and input from more recent trust procurements, the Royal College of Radiologists and NHS colleagues.

• Briefing for trust medical directors (23/1/12) (PDF, 124.6kB) - this briefing for trust medical directors is an accompaniment to the briefing for trust chief executives below. Professor Erika Denton, the Department of Health's National Clinical Director for Imaging and PACS medical director, introduces the briefing in the January 2012 edition of the Medical Director's Bulletin.

• Briefing for trust chief executives and other senior decision-makers (1/1/12) (PDF, 123.3kB)  - PACS is critical to the operation of trust radiology services and all hospital departments where x-rays and scans are accessed. NHS chief executives leading trusts with an LSP-supplied PACS will wish to read this briefing and assure themselves that planning is underway locally to ensure service continuity within their trust when the current LSP contracts expire. An item about the briefing appeared in The Week, the Department of Health's weekly bulletin for NHS chief executives and their teams, on Thursday 1st December 2011 (Gateway reference number: 16948).

• Are you a supplier in the PACS, RIS, storage and/or IT services sectors? Please read our supplier information.