It’s not working and it’s not going to work. It – of course – is the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT). This time the condemnation comes from a source that ought to know what it is talking about – one of the prime contractors.
Specifically it is the doom-laden assessment of Andrew Rollerson, healthcare consultancy practice lead at Fujitsu, which is on course to mop up £896 million – so far – as the prime contractor for the south England region.
He warned a recent NHS conference that the way things are going at the moment, the end result would be “a camel and not the racehorse that we might try to produce”.
He criticised the thinking behind the project, arguing that it lacks vision. “There is a belief that the National Programme is somehow going to propel transformation in the NHS simply by delivering an IT system,” he said. Nothing could be further from the truth. A vacuum, a chasm, is opening up.
“We are desperate to get something in and make it work, versus what the programme really ought to be trying to achieve. The more pressure we come under, both as suppliers and on the NHS side, the more we are reverting to very narrowly focused IT-oriented behaviour. This is not a good sign for the programme.”
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