Director shake-up: Saviour of NHS IT project?

The agency in charge of the £12.7bn revamp of NHS IT is to be overhauled in an attempt to salvage the troubled project.

After years of delays and rising costs on the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), the body which oversees the programme, Connecting for Health (CfH), will see its remit reduced to supporting a new organisation overseeing health technology, the Department of Health Informatics Directorate.

The CfH will also be restructured, with the COO post being scrapped after its current holder, Gordon Hextall, departs next month. The restructure will also see CfH CTO Paul Jones transferring to the Department of Health (DoH).

The restructure of CfH will be completed by April and the DoH said the revamp is an attempt to speed up the delivery of the NPfIT.

"The changes at NHS Connecting for Health are about increasing its focus on delivery and accelerating the implementation of National Programme systems," a spokesman for the department said.

Under CfH's stewardship the cost of the NPfIT has ballooned from £6.2bn to £12.7bn and the rollout of the key Care Records Service - a project to provide electronic patient records nationwide - has been dogged by technical problems and is running at least four years late.

However, Dr Grant Ingrams, chairman of the British Medical Association joint GP IT Committee, criticised the changes, saying they are a further distraction to resolving the real problems with the NPfIT.

"I think it is more a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," he said.

"This time would be better spent looking at the goals of the programme, why can the focus not be on rolling out what we know will provide the best healthcare and we know is achievable?

"Take the shared detailed care records, most people now think that sort of record is unworkable and not in the best interest of healthcare."

Since it was created in 2005, CfH has been instrumental in the delivery of the NPfIT but under the revised structure the National Programme will only be a short-term focus for the head of the CfH Martin Bellamy.

Bellamy, director of programme and systems delivery for the CfH, will be one of six directors that will make up the new informatics directorate. Each director will report to CIO for health, Christine Connelly, and CIO of the NHS Information Centre, Tim Straughan.

The DoH spokesman said: "The director general for informatics is building up the core functions required to ensure the development and delivery of an overall informatics strategy for the health and social care system."

Within CfH a further eight director positions will be created. These include a finance director, chief technology officer and supplier management director - all of whom will report to Bellamy and a manager outside CfH.

A Lorenzo delivery director will also be appointed for the first time, who will oversee the delivery of the Lorenzo patient administration systems - of which none had gone live in a hospital trust by the end of 2008.