NHS puts IT in the casualty ward

The broad goals of the NHS Connecting for Health programme are laudable, so what is going wrong?

As a consultant, I’m naturally loath to endorse the views of other consultants. But I can believe former Capgemini man David Craig, who says that by the end of the third New Labour administration, the government will have spent more than £20bn on management consultants. More recently, I find Richard Holway, director of Ovum, mostly on the nail in his reply to cynics on the question of IT in the NHS.

Holway points out that most people support the overall objective of the NHS’s IT programme, Connecting for Health, and know that “achieving that objective will cause pain”. He notes that one of the advantages of the project is that it hasn’t relied on just a single source of supply.

And Holway congratulates NHS IT supremo Richard Granger for driving some hard bargains with the private sector.

I can’t agree with Holway that NHS IT “will be looked upon throughout the world as a model to be followed”; but that’s because I never agreed with the founder of the NHS, Nye Bevan, that his 1948 creation would be a global beacon of civilisation. However, though Holway doesn’t use the word “ambition”, his statement is an excellent rebuke to all those – from trade union leaders through to The Guardian – who mutter that the goals of the NHS project are beyond us.

They are not. Tory and Liberal MPs have said that the small proportion of life-threatening accidents that happen away from home makes a nationally accessible system of electronic patient records unnecessary. Perhaps they should get out more. In my experience, physical mishaps tend to occur when one is away from home, and one’s local GP.

Holway says that anybody who has ever been involved in any project – big or small – is familiar with the pain it usually involves. But the media and others believe that the pain of NHS IT is all about the abuse of power.

Thus David Craig’s book, written with Richard Brooks of Private Eye, is titled Plundering the Public Sector. Craig and Brooks are right that New Labour gullibility about the private sector knows no bounds: what else would one expect from a party whose acquaintance with entrepreneurship consists simply of Geoffrey Robinson, MP for Coventry North West? But with NHS IT we are talking not so much corporate plunder as a government War on Error.

If you believe that carrying lip-balm on to a plane could serve as a cover for a terrorist plot, you’ll believe that NHS IT must not allow the slightest glitch. As Connecting for Health says of its Choose and Book sub-programme, “Patient safety and security of information are the two highest priorities.”

So the aim is not to cure people of their ailments with the help of IT, but rather to reassure people the media like to magnify as “health watchdogs” and “privacy campaigners”. Base your planning of NHS IT on such mistrust, and you end up spending billions on an impregnable fortress. That’s not a glitch: it’s what Richard Holway refuses to call it – a disaster.