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By Andy McCue, 25 May 2005 15:50

NEWS The head of the £6.2bn NHS IT programme claims the project is "way ahead" of schedule despite reports of missed deadlines and failing suppliers.

Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT, speaking at the Government UK IT summit in London this week said the Connecting for Health programme has even delivered unforeseen benefits.

"We are two years into a ten year job. We've already delivered a number of things that nobody anticipated we would deliver that were out of scope and much of what was in scope. I think we are probably way ahead of where most people thought we would get to in the space of two years from a standing start," he said.

Granger cited statistics such as the 1,200 deaths per year resulting from prescription errors as evidence of the need for the digitisation of a largely paper-based health service.

"I'm hoping that as we get more and more clinical involvement in the programme the debate about how we're doing will focus on some of these statistics rather than focusing in on matters about technology and the plumbing," he said.

The government moved this week to allay public concerns over the privacy of the new electronic patient records by setting out guidelines on which information can be stored and who can access it.

But Granger said "in a strict legal sense" the records will still be owned by the secretary of state.

Granger also admitted it would still be some time before non-core health service information - such as social care records - would be connected to the NHS databases.

"There are some major data sharing issues around data which is collected in a social care setting... and there is great danger in having something which is collected through one approach mixed up with something which is collected through another approach, which is collected for different purposes under different registration arrangements," he said.