During BBC1′s Andrew Marr show on Sunday, Alistair Darling announced that he was going to cut the National Programme for IT because it was ‘not essential for the front line’.
The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) has been branded the largest IT Programme in the world and judging by the Chancellor’s words, it could soon be labelled the most disastrous.
It is more than four years overdue with only 5 full hospital implementations to show for its £3 billion worth of spending to date. Its total budget is estimated to be over £12.7 billion.
But on Tuesday, Andy Burnham assured the House that the Programme is ‘already making the NHS safer, more efficient and more convenient for patients’.
The Government cannot make its mind up about whether this multi-billion pound programme can deliver real benefits to NHS patients. To say it is ‘not essential for the frontline’ is to contradict repeatedly declared Government policy and statements made by successive Ministers over the past five years.
This begs a serious question: will the Government’s threat to scrap the Programme in its entirety put patients at risk? Either the Programme has wasted billions on unnecessary IT – as the Chancellor suggests – or it is vital to patient care and safety – as Andy Burnham asserts.
One of the NPfIT’s many aims is to provide an electronic medical record for every NHS patient in England that can track each patient’s care through the health service and record the treatment they receive.
Conservatives believe electronic medical records are essential to the delivery of high quality and efficient healthcare. But a top-down, centralised IT Programme is never going to support care that is tailored to the needs of individual patients. Neither does it offer value for money to the taxpayer.
We want local NHS Trusts to have a choice of Electronic Patient Record systems within a framework of open standards so that local NHS services can meet the needs of local patients whilst being able to link up with the rest of the NHS.
Our pledge for central Government not to sign large uncompetitive IT contracts will end Labour’s habit of making the public pay for the design and development of costly IT systems. We will open up the market so that competition and innovation can flourish from the grass roots.
Current spending on the programme is in danger of spiralling out of control. Budgets have grown by over half a billion over the last year and the Department is embroiled in a £700 million legal battle of their own making with axed IT supplier, Fujitsu.
Now the Treasury is demanding £500 million of cuts which, contrary to the Chancellor’s intimation of significant savings, constitutes under 5 per cent of the Programme’s overall budget.
Decisive action needs to be taken to get NHS IT back into shape. If the Programme’s strategy is not transformed from top-down to bottom-up then no amount of cuts are going to produce better care for patients and long-term savings for taxpayers.
The Conservatives are committed to a localised vision of IT in the NHS so that we can use IT to achieve the best of both worlds – more benefits for patients and more savings for the taxpayer.
( 5 comments ) Tags: it contracts, national programme for it, nhs it
Comment by A GAINST TARGETS on December 10, 2009 at 12:22 am
As a public sector worker I agree that targets are a waste of time ,and those set by central government even more so. It means that service providers go for quantity and not quality. However, the Conservative Party should not forget that hospital cleaning services were subjected to compulsive competitive tendering and often privatised when they were last in government, and this has resulted in a lack of control over cleaning staff, ie, how often and what type of cleaning is carried out which results in the dirty hospitals and killer germs that people complain about.
I would like to know what the Conservative Party is going to do in regard to obtaining and maintaining the most up-to-date diagnostic equipment, because hospitals seem to be spending billions of pounds on new buildings but it seems to take forever to get anything diagnosed because of a lack of equipment. Doctors start with guessing, then maybe move to x-rays or ultrasound, and sometimes patients get passed around to different consultants, when what they really need is a CT or MRI scan to properly diagnose what is wrong. Hence even when you get to see a consultant after waiting some time it takes even longer to get a diagnosis. This is the reason why so many people die with undetected cancer or find that it is too late to benefit from treatment. This is my experience with family members and friends. Complete waste of time, money and people’s lives. What do the conservatives intend to do about it all?
Comment by leonard matthews on December 13, 2009 at 5:28 pm
your not much better than brown ..,if you are anything like adecent bloke ,and not full of lies like blair and brown you will give us the vote on the e.u. that lies about we need the e.u for jobs is a lot of hot air. we will be better of out of the e.u. you cant relie on europe for jobs , and another thing seeing as you and blair and brown have given every thing that we stood for to the e. u . this is the worst thing you lot have done the lot of you should hang your heads in shame for selling out britain to europe .,, all of you should be tried for treason against this country,, you are going to wish you never sold us out ,, when the e.u. get moving to do what they been wanting to do all along , and i recon you lot already know . so i honestly can see you all becomming obsolete and there being just a pupet government .. about five or six people doing what the e.u. wants
Comment by John Smith on January 10, 2010 at 9:45 am
Wiyh respect A GAINST TARGETS when cleaning was put to outside competition, schedules of what was to be cleaned, how frequent and by what means and using specified cleaning agents should all have been specified in the tendering document. This is the standard by which the cleaning should be judged and complaints made to the firm carrying out the cleaning. If the tendering schedule was poorly done, blame your management not the cleaners.
Comment by David Stimpson on March 3, 2010 at 9:13 pm
You say “We want local NHS Trusts to have a choice of Electronic Patient Record systems within a framework of open standards so that local NHS services can meet the needs of local patients whilst being able to link up with the rest of the NHS”.
How on earth do you expect this to happen without somebody managing its delivery? Who will enable this ‘linking-up’?
Open standards are very well but they also are variable in their implementation. Who will ensure that IT systems are implemented in such a way to enable their integration?
Finally, who will ensure that systems implemented locally are robust and able to be relied upon once critical to the patient care pathway?
Either you are genuine yet lack NHS experience as evident by your comments or you are exhibiting classic Tory contempt for the NHS as you know your plans would only destabilise and fragment IT across the Organisation.
Comment by Gordon MacLellan FRCS on March 14, 2010 at 8:03 pm
The rapid introduction of Electronic Patient records in some hospitals assumes that they will be cofidential. We know that will not be the case.
This weekend we read that the Inland Revenue have bought details of private Bank accounts from a French source to chase people for tax.. If bank accounts are not secure, nor are our health records.
Just consider for one moment the implication of seeking Life Insurance to support a Mortgage and having had a Hepatitis or HIV test in connection with one’s employment (I am a Surgeon and therefore in a high risk category for some insurers). Insurance could be denied or loaded with no reason being given.
No government is entitled to my medical records. They are private.
If I want to share them or part of them I could ask for the necessary data to be put on a memory stick so I could take it on holiday with me ar if I go to another GP or Hospital in the UK.
There is no need for the Big Brother ‘Spine’.
It is URGENT that this is stopped on 7th may.
If not we will all have lost the last shred of privacy to which we are entitled.
Please speak up NOW and TELL EVERYONE.