Whitehall officials will start dismantling parts of
Connecting for Health next month in a bid to "reinvigorate" the
£12.4bnNational Programme for IT(NPfIT).
Under the plan, which forms part of an audit by NHS chief
executive David Nicholson, some staff, job roles, budgets and
responsibilities will be transferred from the agency to local and
regional organisations.
The rethink means that responsibility for meeting key local and
national objectives of the NPfIT will be dispersed to more than 150
senior responsible owners at local and regional health service
sites.
Among these, the regional senior responsible owners - in
practice, the chief executives of strategic health authorities -
will be expected to commit to ensuring that deployments meet the
NHS's contractual commitments to local service providers.
Under the contract, the NHS has to place a minimum amount of
business with these suppliers each year.
The NPfIT Local Ownership Programme is Whitehall's response to a
report by the National Audit Office last year that said that a
critical factor in the success of the NPfIT would be the local
support of doctors and other NHS staff.
But so far it is unclear how much freedom local senior
responsible owners will have to operate, and whether they would be
held responsible for any failure of the NPfIT, which after four
years continues to be beset by uncertainty - in particular over
electronic health records.
By the end of this month, trusts are expected to submit to
Whitehall local IT plans that reflect NPfIT commitments as well as
"national expectations".
Connecting for Health will continue to be responsible for NPfIT
commercial strategy, contract negotiations, specialist technical
functions and overall finance.
This will leave strategic health authorities and NHS trusts to
take more responsibility for defining the requirements and design
of NPfIT products, and their subsequent delivery and
implementation.
Cluster organisations - which represent NHS organisations in
dealings with local service providers - are to be abolished.
At last week's annual
Healthcare Computing conference in Harrogate,
the new arrangements - known as the NPfIT Local Ownership Programme
- were met with ambivalence.
In reply to an NHS delegate who was concerned that
responsibility for the programme was being passed around,
conference panellist Colin Tully, who is professor of software
practice at Middlesex University, said, "Unless you devolve real
responsibility to the smallest possible unit, then I think it is
all hot air."
The transfer of responsibilities is due to happen on 1 April.
However, if all arrangements are not finalised by that date, a
memorandum of understanding may be put in place to give the NHS
management control of Connecting for Health "until such time as
resource is transferred", according to a paper published by Stephen
Singleton of the North East Strategic Health Authority.
A spokesman for Connecting for Health said, "Funding is passed
from NHS Connecting for Health to the NHS for things like the early
adopter sites of the Summary Care Record to help support them with
the additional costs of being one of the first sites to test
systems and go live.
"We will also be passing money to the NHS as a consequence of
the NPfIT Local Ownership Programme, but this has not yet been
finalised."
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