Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the amount of manual processing on paper that it carries out and to make such processing digital.

The Department is committed to providing digital services and delivering on the Government’s sustainability targets. This includes measures taken to reduce printing and manual processing on paper. We have introduced a managed print service and have replaced old printers with fast, modern, multi-functional Xerox devices. These provide “Follow me” capability which releases print copies only when collected thus reducing paper wastage, cutting printing costs and reducing the risk of information being misplaced.

The Department routinely uses digital technologies to manage information electronically including online performance appraisals, sickness absence and pay slips, and the digital processing of procurement and purchasing, invoicing and correspondence. File sharing and publishing are carried out via digital channels including Cloud services. Plans are in place to further digitise departmental business processes and improve access to online management information in 2018.

By the end of the summer the Department will also have move to a fully mobile device enabled workforce, which supported by corporate wifi services will see all Departmental staff able access digital services and perform transactions digitally on internal and external systems.