NHS IT system “very badly handled”

The new IT system for the NHS has been criticised by a member of the Public Accounts Committee for being “very badly handled”.

Richard Bacon, the Conservative MP, said that the total of the project had increased from the original six billion pound figure by five times – something that he said was no surprise.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four’s World at One programme, he said that health minister Lord Warner’s reason for delaying the introduction of the new IT network – that doctors could not agree what information should be accessible – was something that should have been sorted out at the start of the design process, not one billion pounds into the project.

Mr Bacon said: “[The] National Care Records Service, they have just announced that it doesn’t have to be national after all, which makes you wonder what was the point of the whole thing?”

“There are shelf-loads of advice that say when you are doing projects like this, do them bit by bit, incrementally, go from the known to the unknown one step at a time. Don’t try and do a big bang,” he added.

A BBC poll of GPs found that the government’s new “Choose and Book” computer system was “poor” or “fairly poor”, according to half of those surveyed. According to the Guardian, Lord Warner said that the inflated cost was always planned for and that the original six billion pounds figure was only intended to cover the core systems.

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