§ Mr. BurstowTo ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will set out the(a) time scale, (b) funding and (c) content of his Department's plans to integrate community pharmacists into the national IT programme. [158960]
§ Mr. HuttonThe initial time scale, funding and objectives of the Department's plans for the national programme for information technology in the national health service (NPfIT) were set out in the strategy document, "21st century IT", published in June 2002.
The key objective of the NPfIT is to support, over time, the delivery of integrated health and social care by enabling appropriate access to records and improved storage, sharing and management of core data by all clinicians—including community pharmacists—involved in the delivery of care to the patient, subject to confidentiality and security safeguards and the informed consent of the patient.
We have redefined the scope of the electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP) programme in order to support the wider pharmacy agenda. It will enable better use of pharmacists' skills and use them to provide patient centred healthcare services that are integral to the NHS.
The ETP programme will enable the commitments made in "Delivering 21st Century IT" to be taken forward and will provide support for the broader pharmacy agenda outlined in "Pharmacy in the Future" and "A Vision for Pharmacy in the New NHS".
Key elements of the electronic transmission of prescriptions system have been procured as part of the recently concluded NHS care records service procurements. Work is under way to plan how community pharmacies can be connected to the system and how their pharmacy computer systems can be upgraded to comply with the requisite technical specification. It is intended that deployment of the live system will commence from January 2005.