The Department of Health has denied a Sunday tabloid
story saying the £12.4 billionNational Programme for ITis about to
be shelved.
On Sunday, The News of the World reported that an "insider" said
the programme "doesn't work and is never going to". Meanwhile
hospitals had been secretly told to buy their own systems at their
own cost, the paper said.
However, a spokesman for the Department of Health said, "This
story is wrong. Hospitals have not been told to secretly buy their
own systems.
"There are no plans to 'shelve' the National Programme for IT in
the NHS and far from being a failure, the NHS would fail in the
future to fully function without it."
The spokesman said that the NHS in England now had more than
19,000 broadband connections, around 42 patient appointments were
electronically booked every ten seconds and 99 medical
imagining installations, as a result of the programme.
"The NHS in England has led the world in building a reliable,
pervasive infrastructure which allows structured messages related
to appointments, prescriptions, demographics and shortly,
Summary Care Records for safer and more effective out of hours
care to be transmitted throughout the NHS," the department
spokesman said. "To attack this programme in this way is to
politicise something which is of benefit to NHS patients and
essential to a modern health service."