End of the line for NHS IT agency?

Consultation is to take place over the future of the agency that has overseen the £12.7bn revamp of NHS IT.

The Department of Health (DoH) is in talks over what should become of the Connecting for Health (CfH) name after the agency's head Martin Bellamy departs at the end of this month.

Staff will be given a number of options for how the brand will be used in future, including stopping using the CfH name altogether.

The new DoH informatics directorate will assume responsibility for staff within the CfH and delivering the 10 projects under the £12.7bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT) from July.

It is part of a shake-up of the way that NHS IT is delivered, with responsibility falling to six directors reporting to director general of informatics Christine Connelly and CIO of the NHS Information Centre, Tim Straughan.

Bellamy's responsibilities will broadly fall to the DoH head of programmes and operations Tim Donohoe, who will oversee delivery of the NPfIT and other NHS IT projects, and head of resources, services and governance Carol Clarke.

Bellamy is moving to the Cabinet Office where he will help head up the government's vision for delivering the G-Cloud, a suite of centrally hosted applications for central and local government.

He has been in the CfH role for less than nine months, having been appointed alongside Connelly in September 2008 to take the place of Richard Granger, former NHS director general of IT and head of CfH.

Granger left the role in January 2008 and former CfH COO Gordon Hextall left CfH in April this year.

A DoH spokesman said of Bellamy's departure: "He is wished every success in this new challenge."

The NHS IT restructuring is being undertaken partly to help fulfil new expectations of the way healthcare is provided as outlined by Lord Darzi.

It is understood the DoH hopes the new structure will help it avoid repeating past mistakes in delivering IT projects in future programmes.

The public release of 31 Office of Government Commerce gateway reviews into the National Programme for IT last week revealed that warnings the project was at risk of failure dated back to 2002.