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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39155724,00.htm

Leader: NHS IT - now the real work begins
Soon demands to justify the £6.2bn spend will begin

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 19 January 2006

The NHS is often tagged as having the third biggest workforce in the world after the Red Army and the Indian Railway.

So it should be no surprise that its IT modernisation project, which kicked off a couple of years ago, is one of the largest public sector technology projects on the planet. But even given the scale, it's easy to underestimate some of the challenges it faces.

Until now the NHS has had little in the way of centralised IT systems. And along with the huge amount of work that comes from implementing a broad range of technology projects - on a scale rarely attempted anywhere else - the people behind the programme need to win the hearts and minds of NHS staff.

This is no easy task when they are rightly more focused on caring for patients, rather than worrying about the rollout of IT systems, especially if they can't see the immediate benefit.

And all this in an organisation which doesn't have very good experiences of change applied from above. The long-standing poor reputation of government IT projects doesn't exactly help either.

There are so many different groups - or as New Labour would have it "stakeholders" - which need to be appeased, that it is impressive the programme has got as far as it has.

The NHS has done well out of this government, making its doctors and nurses some of the best paid in the world. And at £6.2bn - not taking into account the expenditure by trusts on updating their own IT - the national project isn't exactly cheap.

And while early successes such as the ahead-of-schedule N3 network have to be applauded, it is worrying that some other projects appear to be running slower than expected.

The NHS must make every effort to ensure that errant projects are brought back into the fold and not allowed to stray further.

There are already rumbles that the NHS won't in future be getting as much money from government as it has done so far. Which means the IT modernisation project will be under increasing pressure to start proving it can improve patient care and cut costs at the same time.