NHS: National Programme for Information Technology (Hansard, 29 January 2004)

§ Baroness Andrews

The National Programme for Information Technology in the National Health Service (NPfIT) has met all its key milestones in the year 2003. Following the publication of a notice in the 59WA Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC) on 31 January 2003, a major procurement exercise has taken place. This has been primarily concerned with letting contracts for IT systems and services that will enable improvements to be made in patient choice, and in patient care and treatment.

In 2003 the following contracts were awarded:

to British Telecommunication (BT) to set up and run the national NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS) worth a total of £620 million to run until 2013
to Accenture as the local service provider in the north-east, worth a total of £1,099 million to run until 2013
to BT as the local service provider for London, worth a total of £996 million to run until 2013
to SchlumbergerSema to provide core services for the national electronic booking system valued at £64.5 million over five years
to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) as the local service provider, worth a total of £973 million, for the north-west and West Midlands clusters to run until 2013
to Accenture as the local service provider in the east, worth a total of £934 million to run until 2013.

The remaining local service provider contract for the southern cluster and the National NHS Network (N3) will be awarded in the near future.

The contracting process for the London cluster proceeded to schedule, and there have been no major setbacks.

NPfIT has put in place strong programme management arrangements, including the mitigation of risks, in line with the Office of Government Commerce's measures to ensure the successful delivery of major IT projects.

These include the appointment of an experienced Director General, the establishment of a design authority for NPfIT, the appointment of a programme management consultancy to strengthen programme controls, the appointment of chief information officers for each strategic health authority, the appointment of regional implementation directors for each of the five clusters and the appointment of a core team whose members are drawn from earlier successful major projects in the public and private sectors.

The design authority will develop and control the standards and specifications for applications and systems to ensure the interoperability, scalability and durability of systems newly deployed within the programme.