§ Dr. Murrison:To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate his Department has made of the cost of implementing the National Programme for IT in strategic health authorities. [174107]
§ Mr. Hutton:The contracts let by the national programme for information technology amount to a cost of £6.2 billion over 10 years. The £2.3 billion allocated in the 2002 spending review will implement core services across all trusts and general practitioner practices, including electronic booking, electronic transfer of prescriptions, a basic national health service care records service and the new national network.
Strategic health authorities are the planning and performance monitoring bodies for the NHS and as such will not incur direct implementation costs for the key applications and systems that will be delivered in trusts and general practitioner practices. The local service providers are currently working with NHS trusts to develop local implementation plans. These will help to profile the NHS effort and resource, for example, training costs over the implementation period.
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Increase over the six year period Staff group September 1997 September 2003 Number Percentage Clinical oncology consultants 287 1358 71 25 Respiratory medicine consultants 309 1570 261 84 Radiographers (therapeutic and diagnostic) 11,771 13,344 1,573 13 Cardiothoracic surgeons 156 1217 61 39 Nurses 318,856 386,359 67,503 21 1December 2003 data.