By Nick Heath, 18 June 2008 11:00
NEWS
The head of the NHS has defended delays that have kept a key system from going live in the £12.7bn upgrade of health service IT.
Six years into the national NHS IT programme (NPfIT) the Lorenzo care records systems have still not gone live anywhere in the country, leaving health trusts in the North, Midlands and the East to rely on interim systems while they wait for Lorenzo to be deployed.
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The Lorenzo system has been deployed for testing at trusts in Bradford, Morecambe Bay and south Birmingham, where it is expected to go live during the summer.
At a Public Accounts Committee hearing into the National Programme for IT committee member Richard Bacon MP questioned the extensive delays to Lorenzo.
NHS CEO David Nicholson defended the delays in delivering the NPfIT, saying the project was "incredibly ambitious, nowhere in the world delivers an IT system quite like the one we want for the NHS" but said the health service had "learnt lessons".
The deadline for the completion of the NPfIT has slipped five years and been revised three times.
Interviews for a new NHS CIO will take place at the end of June and for the project director for the NPfIT at the beginning of July, the hearing heard.
The two £200,000 per year posts will fill the IT director general post vacated by Richard Granger in January this year.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Charles Norman
"learnt lessons" seems to be a phrase still in vogue for UK politico speak.
My questions whether those same lessons were taught in the 1980's about how to prevent projects from failing.
Let's be blunt. A 5 year delay on a project is clearly a failure for which the NHS (tax payer) has paid dearly. In no shape or form could the project be called a success.
2. anonymous
When will civil servants learn that the bigger the project, the more likely it is to, at best run late and be over budget, at worst to fail completely.
There was a myriad of top quality WORKING software already in the NHS - none of it was deemed suitable by the "experts" and brand new systems specified (badly?) and developments set in train.
3. anonymous
There is no minister for requirement. There is a minister for procurement but no minister for requirement. Requirement is not taken seriously. When a new public sector project is decided upon, the first thing that happens is that procurement takes place, e.g., 100,000 laptops from a well known hardware supplier, a multi-million pound software contract with one of the big software companies, preferably one with an excellent track record already of overdue, over budget, largely unworkable, large-scale public sector deliveries. (Are there any other sort?) Later on a bolted together set of conflicting requirements starts to be collected and continually amended.