NHS Connecting for Health, which manages supplier
contracts on the£12.7bn National Programme for IT, is
replacing contractors with permanent staff to cut its costs. The
organisation is understood to employ more than 900
people.
Computer Weekly understands that there will be no large-scale
cut in staff numbers at Connecting for Health. But market
researcher Ovum reports that CfH will become "little more than a
delivery arm, with the strategic power resting with the Department
of Health".
Tola Sargeant at Ovum adds that since 2003/4 when the NPfIT's
contracts with local service providers began, the Department of
Health has brought in policies which needed new IT support - but
CFH has found itself struggling to implement IT changes within
contracts and budgets that did not foresee them.
Policy changes which have needed new IT support include a new
General Medical Services contract for GPs, giving people a choice
of hospitals, and a government promise that patients will not wait
more than 18 weeks between a GP referring them to hospital and the
start of treatment.
Sargeant said that although CFH itself will lose power in a
restructuring, it could lead to better alignment between NHS policy
and IT. "Having some NHS CFH people in senior roles within the DoH
will put IT experts in a stronger position to influence policy that
affects the [NPfIT] programme," she said.
For NHS trusts uncertainties continue. One of the two remaining
local service providers to the NPIT, CSC, has been in talks for
about a year to renegotiate parts of its contract. And NHS trusts
are unsure when a fit-for-purpose version of the Lorenzo patient
administration system will be delivered.
The other NPfIT local service provider, BT, is waiting for a
government signature on its prices and proposals to take over eight
NHS sites in the south of England which have been supplied by the
outgoing provider Fujitsu.
Trust boards in the south, meanwhile, are unsure whether to
commit to buying patient administration systems from the NPfIT
suppliers CSC or BT - which CfH wants them to do - or buy "interim"
systems elsewhere.
Computer Weekly understands that trusts will soon be given
greater freedom to buy systems of their choice, within limits.
Ovum
comment on the NPfIT >>