The head of an organisation set up to help shape the
NHS’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) says he was asked to resign
10 days after writing a letter criticising the
scheme.
Peter Hutton, consultant anaesthetist at University Hospital
Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, resigned as chairman of the
National Clinical Advisory Board, which was set by the Department
of Health to help ensure that new national systems were what
doctors wanted.
At the time, in early 2004, an NPfIT spokesman said he regretted
Hutton’s resignation and thanked him for his “significant
contributions to the pro¬gramme, especially the development of the
NHS care record”.
Hutton, a former chairman of the Academy of Medical Royal
Colleges and a past president of the Royal College of
Anaesthetists, resigned after expressing concerns about what he saw
as a lack of clinical input into the NPfIT.
He revealed the circumstances around his resignation at a
meeting of the Public Accounts Committee last week into the
NPfIT.
The hearing was told that core software for the Care Records
Service – a system designed to provide an online medical record for
50 million patients in England – has been delayed for at least two
years. Hutton told the committee, “I think the situation we are in
was entirely predictable in the early part of 2004.”
Hutton said he had written to Nigel Crisp, then chief executive
of the NHS. His letter in March 2004 was written months after
Whitehall had awarded £6.2bn worth of IT contracts as part of the
NPfIT.
The letter said, “I remain concerned that the current
arrangements within the programme are unsafe from a variety of
angles and, in particular, that the constraints of the contracting
process, with its absence of clinical input, may have resulted in
the purchase of a product that will potentially not fulfil our
goals.”
Hutton told the committee, “Within 10 days of writing that, I
was asked to resign.”
During the committee hearing Hutton criticised aspects of the
contracts. He said that officials did not seem sure what they
wanted to buy and, “I do not think the people selling it knew what
we needed.”
But officials replied that there had been strong clinical input
into the work leading to the award of contracts.
Computer Weekly Comment
Some seek infinite wisdom, others a big lottery win. All a
committee of MPs wanted last week was straight answers to their
questions on the NHS’s £12.4bn IT scheme. They would have found it
easier to win the lottery and acquire infinite wisdom.
The lead civil servant before the Public Accounts Committee was
Ian Carruthers, acting chief executive of the NHS.
Had he been asked to state clearly whether his tie was blue,
nobody would have been surprised if his answer had been, “It is
important to recognise that substantial progress has been made and
targets have been exceeded and in some areas accelerated. We need
to see this in a wider context where much has been achieved with
over 10,000 installations already in place.”
Many statistics were given to MPs during their one-off hearing
on the National Programme for IT. But they did not learn exactly
why the core software is at least two years late.
When an IT programme is in trouble, truth can become a precious
jewel buried so deep it can be extracted only with tireless
determination. That is why we continue to campaign for an
independent review of the scheme.
Not until last week did it emerge that a disastrous IT-related
reform programme at the Child Support Agency had been the subject
of 40 audit reviews, 70% of which had sounded alarm bells. None had
been published, so there was no parliamentary pressure to act on
them.
Ministers say there have been many independent reviews of the
NHS scheme. But none has been published. We do not want to wait for
years, perhaps until it is too late, to discover the real
challenges and difficulties the NHS programme has faced.
Doctors vote for opt-in on e-records >>
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