The government is to scrap the NHS’s National Programme for IT after a damning report by procurement experts.
They found that the programme was not fit to meet the NHS’s needs, though some successes were recorded.
Ministers have refused to publish the full report by the Major Projects Authority, part of the Cabinet Office. However, a Department of Health statement said it had concluded: ‘It is no longer appropriate for a centralised authority to make decisions on behalf of local [NHS] organisations.’
Some £6.4bn has been spent since the programme began in 2002. The MPA said around two-thirds of this had been used well, on projects that included NHSmail, Choose and Book and the Secondary Uses Service.
But it found: ‘The National Programme for IT has not and cannot deliver to its original intent.’
Prime Minister David Cameron ordered the MPA to review the programme last May following a highlycritical report by the National Audit Office.
That concluded that the flagship project to provide an electronic care record for every patient ‘is falling far below expectations and…will not now be achieved’.
It said the £2.7bn spent on the care records system ‘does not represent value for money’ and it had no confidence that any improvement could be secured.
NAO head Amyas Morse said at the time: ‘This is yet another example of a department fundamentally underestimating the scale and complexity of a major IT-enabled change programme.’
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said the government would not tolerate further failures of costly IT projects, and that the programme had ‘embodied the type of unpopular top-down programme that has been imposed on frontline NHS staff in the past’.
Katie Davis, DoH managing director for informatics, said IT projects would no longer normally be delivered centrally.
She has launched a review of all the department’s informatics applications and services, and will decide later this year which would continue.
The DoH has launched a partnership with Intellect, the technology industry trade association, to try to stimulate the market so that it would ‘no longer exclude small and medium-sized companies from participating in significant government health care projects’.
