A system of electronic records developed by a children's hospice

This paper describes the development, implementation and dissemination of an electronic data collection system for children's hospices in the UK. In 1999, CHASE Hospice Care for Children (CHASE) began providing support for life-limited children and their families in their own homes across south-west London, Surrey and West Sussex. CHASE community team is multidisciplinary and original members of the team had to create all of the necessary administrative systems for collecting and storing information about referrals and care provided to children and their families. The community team had the foresight to record activity statistics from day one of the service. The team worked together to identify information routinely collected that could usefully be stored on a computer database and a simple solution was created for this purpose using Microsoft Access version 2. CHASE was in a privileged position because the commitment to use information technology came from people providing care to children and their families.