Hutton rejects NHS IT bill concerns
The flagship NHS IT system may end up costing at least £18.6 billion, around three times the previously announced figure.
The network, National Programme for IT (NpfIT), will allow all patient records to be kept electronically, allowing hospitals and GPs to access patient information immediately. Patients will also be able to book their own appointments electronically.
The latest official estimate of the cost of the project was £6.2 billion over 10 years, but Computer Weekly magazine claims that officials in the Department of Health have estimated that the total implementation costs could be between £18.6 billion and £31 billion.
It has been suggested that the implementation costs for the project might have to come out of the individual budgets of NHS trusts, some of which are already overstretched.
Speaking this morning, Health Minister John Hutton rejected the implication that the programme had not been correctly costed. Mr Hutton told the BBC’s ‘Today’ programme that: “We are not going to ask the NHS to carry an unsustainable financial burden; we’re not stupid.
“We’ve made very substantial amounts of resource available to the NHS to support the national programme for IT which is going to improve patient safety, equality and the overall patient experience of using the NHS”.
He argued that NHS trusts currently spend about £1 billion a year operating the existing IT systems and “so of course once the national programme starts to come through in the NHS that is resource that will be available to support the implementation of a national programme”.
Mr Hutton also stressed that there is the potential for major efficiency savings and improved patient safety, noting: “I think, overall, the quality and the safety that patients will experience from the NHS IT programme are going to be potentially very significant savings for the NHS as well.”
