By Nick Heath, 2 February 2009 14:44
NEWS
The number of severe faults in NHS computer systems has almost doubled over the last three years.
Last year nationwide NHS computer systems suffered 820 severity one or critical faults, up from 488 in 2006.
A severity one fault is a problem affecting a system critical to patient care or affecting 5,000 NHS computer users or more.
The NHS attributed the rise to teething problems among the growing number of systems being rolled out across the NHS as part of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT) - parts of which have suffered technical difficulties and are years behind schedule.
The figures were revealed in a written parliamentary answer to Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb.
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A spokesman for the NHS Connecting for Health service delivery team said: "When you deploy a national system such as The Spine or Choose and Book, you will get some glitches as problems emerge and are discovered.
"As systems are upgraded with more functionality they are getting much greater use, and at the same time the number of deployed units has increased."
Connecting for Health's spokesman declined to say which systems had been affected by severity one faults.
In October 2008 the number of critical faults in national IT systems jumped to 165, from 71 the previous month - a spike the spokesman attributed to "a set of issues affecting two systems" that had a "noticeable effect" on a number of NHS computer users.
"Other than the month of October 2008, the number of severity one incidents each month has been fairly low, against a rate of increase of 10 to 11 per cent per half year in the number of systems deployed," he said.
The spokesman added that the number of severity one faults could also be inflated by a tendency among users to categorise IT problems as being more severe than they actually were to prioritise the response, adding that faults were often recategorised as being less serious following further investigation.
The figures were revealed in the wake of a critical report into the NPfIT by the parliamentary watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee, which gave the Department of Health six months to speed up the rollout of a delayed NPfIT project, the Care Records Service, or risk seeing the scheme broken up.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Richard Davies
any project manager worth there job would be able to deal with glitches etc. and still bring the project in on time and within budget...that is, if its planned and managed correctly from the start!
2. Anonymous
Sadly the NPfIT on it's wonderous incarnation got rid of most of them six years ago......
3. anonymous
Testing, Testing, Testing......
Esp. for Medical Systems. Correct me if I am wrong, but despite the fact there are procedures, hoops to jump through and process to get new drugs approved for use, there is not formal testing process/standard for Medical IT Systems.......
NHS NPfIT - Business Process Overhaul driven by Politics, Procurement, Programme Management and Wishful Thinking....
....as opposed to clinical need.
4. anonymous
Presumably the really good project managers also know the difference between there and their?
You can't know whether there are actually more faults or just better systems for reporting them or more diligence in users in reporting them?
Useless news really.
5. Tony Sygrove
We told you so 6 years ago but no one listened and now where are we the guys who could have prevented this? Well I for one was made redundant and now work abroad on similar projects as a Senior Consultant making sure these things dont happen in the countries I work.
6. anonymous
Why am I not surprised?