NHS trusts will have the funds to allow them to increase
their IT budgets to 4% of the total NHS spend, according to the
health minister John Hutton.
This would allow trusts to more than double their spending on
information management and systems. Many of them now allocate only
between 1% and 2% of their total budgets to IT.
The extra money could ease the financial pressures on trusts
implementing locally the national programme for IT (NPfIT), the
government's multibillion-pound modernisation initiative.
Hutton's announcement was in the form of a Parliamentary reply to a
question from Liberal Democrat health spokesman Paul Burstow. It
was prompted by Computer Weekly's disclosure that the NPfIT could
cost up to £31bn to implement.
Some trust IT directors reacted with scepticism to Hutton's
statement. One NHS IT director told Computer Weekly, "There is no
doubt that NHS organisations are getting more money each year over
and above inflation increases, but at the same time, volume of
activity is rising.
"The only way in which IT will get more money is for the centre to
require trusts to demonstrate year-on-year progress towards the
holy grail of 4%, with audits to check it out. If they do not do
this, the money will never get down to the IT departments."
Some trusts are already finding extra funds to help pay for early
implementations of national systems. But this is not a universal
picture. One executive working on the NPfIT said last week that
some trusts were reducing their IT spend in the mistaken belief
that the money for implementing the national programme locally was
coming directly from central funds.
Hutton did not say by when the target of 4% would be reached, and
he gave no commitment that the extra money allocated to the NHS
would be spent on IT. He made it clear that central funding of the
NPfIT "does not include the cost of training NHS staff or local
change management costs".