The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 276 No 7406 p741
24 June 2006

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Challenges remain for the National IT programme

The National Programme for IT is on budget but implementation of several systems is behind schedule and key challenges remain, including winning the support of NHS staff and the public, the National Audit Office said last week.

In its report (PDF 760K), the NAO confirms that the National Care Records Service, central to the vision of the whole programme, is running two years later than planned. However, implementation of the full service is still expected by 2010, health minister Lord Warner said at a press briefing following publication of the report. The NAO also notes that build up of the electronic prescription service, choose and book, and picture archiving and communications systems have been slow to start.

The NAO concludes that although NHS Connecting for Health has made substantial progress with the programme, three significant challenges remain, namely, to ensure that IT suppliers stick to agreed timescales without further slippage, to ensure NHS organisations play their part in implementing the programme’s systems and to win the support of NHS staff and the public. The report says that there is support among NHS staff for what the programme is seeking to achieve but that significant concerns remain, including the slow start and a lack of clarity on when systems will be delivered and what they will do.

Lord Warner commented: “You could argue that we should have worked harder at the beginning on staff engagement, but we have done a lot of work on clinical engagement and have put in place national clinical leads.” The report recommends that more clinical leads should be appointed to help build momentum for the programme as it is deployed nationally.

The NAO estimates that the total cost of the programme will be £12.4bn over the 10 years of its implementation. This includes the nationally agreed contracts (now up from £6.2bn to £6.8bn), other central expenditure and local implementation costs. The gross cost of the programme is expected to be offset by savings within the local NHS, for example, when new systems paid for by NHS Connecting for Health replace existing systems previously paid for locally. The report says that it will be some time before it is possible to assess fully the value for money of the programme.

The figure of £20bn quoted by Lord Warner earlier this month (PJ, 3 June, p648) was the total spend on IT in the NHS over the next 10 years, including payroll and existing IT systems. Commenting after the report’s publication, Lord Warner said that he would stake his reputation on saying that, in the long term, the programme will pay for itself.