NHS awards £41m support deal to Fujitsu

The NHS has signed a seven-year contract with Fujitsu Services which will see the supplier provide service desk support for health service IT applications.

Under the contract - valued at £41m for the "core service" - Fujitsu will provide support for the NHS' National Programme for IT (NPfIT) applications.

NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) said the deal will allow the health service to get "professional, scaleable and consistent first-line support" for its applications.

These include the NHS Care Records Service, Choose and Book, Electronic Prescriptions Service and the Picture Archiving and Communications Service.

The contract has two elements. Core services includes national service desk support, capable of managing all the user support, reports and incidents that may be associated with NPfIT systems and services.

The new contact centres will be based at four locations throughout England and up to 870,000 NHS staff will have access to the service when fully operational.

At its peak it is anticipated that the service desk will manage approximately four million calls per year.

On top of this, the NHS can use the framework arrangement services whereby service desk support for a wider range of IT systems and services can be obtained from Fujitsu if local NHS management want to.

NHS organisations will need to fund any services they obtain through the framework arrangement services but CfH said this arrangement allows NHS organisations to take advantage of nationally negotiated prices.

Fujitsu Services public sector managing director Peter Hutchinson said in a statement: "As a result of this new service, NHS staff will receive a much enhanced IT helpdesk function at improved value for money."