The biggest computer programme in the world ever! How's it going?
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& 2007 JIT Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 0268-3962/07 $30.00 palgrave-journals.com/jit
Research article
The biggest computer programme in the world ever! How’s it going? Sean Brennan Clinical Matrix Ltd., Huddersfield, UK Correspondence: S Brennan, Clinical Matrix Ltd, 27a, Alwen Avenue, Huddersfield HD2 2SJ, UK. Tel: þ 44 01484 454 568; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract Early in 2004, the British Government announced the award of eight enormous IT contracts with a combined value of more than d6 billion. The companies selected would introduce new IT systems and processes to Europe’s largest public sector organisation, the National Health Service (NHS) in England. The contracts were due to run for 7 years, until December 2010. At the end of June this year, the contracts will be exactly halfway through. But all is not well with the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), and both the programme and the agency NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CfH) set up to deliver the programme, have received considerable, and sustained criticism from many sources since their inception. Is this criticism justified or are some critics simply jumping onto a bandwagon? This paper attempts to provide an unbiased (if such a thing is possible) commentary on the programme so far. Journal of Information Technology (2007) 22, 202–211. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000104 Published online 31 July 2007 Keywords: NPfIT; Connecting for Health; health informatics; NHS IT project; clinical IT
Introduction f a week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson famously said, then 2 years is a very, very, long time in this NHS computer programme. This paper builds on the author’s book – ‘The NHS IT Project: The Biggest Computer Programme in the World Ever!’ (Brennan, 2005). Because of the rapid pace of change within the National Programme, there have been changes that were not mentioned or even considered in the original book. For example, NHS CfH was not even a twinkle in the old dog’s eye when the manuscript was submitted in December 2004. It has become increasingly obvious to the NHS and to other observers that the scale of the NHS NPfIT is far greater than anything the UK public sector has ever seen. But is the programme too ambitious? Plans published by NHS CfH in January 2005 indicated that by April 2007, 151 acute hospital trusts would have implemented patient administration systems of varying degrees of sophistication. But as of 18 April this year, only 18 had been deployed, and as we have already seen, feedback on the programme has been often less than positive. To make matters worse (for the programme); the structure of the NHS has changed too since 2002. That is nothing new to those readers who work inside the
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ever-changing NHS. Re-organisation always follows reorganisation and it often seems as if a number of complete re-organisation cycles are completed in every employee’s lifetime. Strategic Health Authority (SHA) boundaries have been re-drawn, Foundation Trusts have become commonplace, and the NHS Information Auth
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