Don't be silly. According to Princeton U. professor and economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, the NHS is doing wonderfully -- a miracle of modern medicine and technocratic management.
A multi-billion pound IT project started by Labour to link all parts of the NHS is to be abandoned, it will be announced on Thursday.
Ministers will say the ill-fated £11.4 billion National Programme for IT, set up by Labour in 2002, is to be "urgently dismantled" following criticism that it is not value for taxpayers' money.
Following an official review, the "one size fits all" project will be replaced by cheaper regional schemes allowing local health trusts and GPs to develop or buy individual computer systems to suit their needs.
The Coalition's Major Projects Authority, established to review Labour's financial commitments to gauge if they provide value for money, found the scheme was not fit to provide services to the NHS, which has to make about £20bn in savings.
It comes after a damning report from a cross-party committee of MPs concluded the programme had proved "beyond the capacity of the Department of Health to deliver".
"Labour's IT programme let down the NHS and wasted taxpayers' money by imposing a top-down IT system on the local NHS, which didn't fit their needs," Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, will say.
And in related news:
NHS hospitals crippled by PFI scheme
Patient care is under threat at more than 60 NHS hospitals which are "on the brink of financial collapse" because of costly private finance initiative schemes, the Health Secretary will warn.
Andrew Lansley says he has been contacted by 22 health service trusts which claim their "clinical and financial stability" is being undermined by the costs of the contracts, which the Labour government used extensively to fund public sector projects.
The Daily Telegraph can disclose that the trusts in jeopardy include Barts and the London, Oxford Radcliffe, North Bristol, St Helens and Knowsley, and Portsmouth.
Between them the trusts run more than 60 hospitals which care for 12 million patients.
Under the PFI deals, a private contractor builds a hospital or school. It owns the building for up to 35 years, and during this period the public sector must pay interest and repay the cost of construction, as well as paying the contractor to maintain the building.
However, the total cost of the deals is often far more than the value of the assets. As a result, Mr Lansley says, the 22 trusts "cannot afford" to pay for their schemes, which in total are worth more than £5.4 billion, because the required payments have risen sharply in the wake of the recession.
"...In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. Weve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false...."
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
09/22/2011 8:56 Comments ||
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#2
This has to be a scam, a government sponsored ripoff. No way in hell can a legitimate IT project cost that much and take so long to complete. Did they ever hear of the Internet? Even a private TCP/IP network would be cheaper. You get a bunch of servers, install Linux operating system and Oracle database and there you go. Eleven million pounds, tops. Even that would probably be too high. These people cannot possibly be that stupid.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/22/2011 11:43 Comments ||
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#3
Dear Abu boo. After 30+ years in IT, the last 15 as a consultant this is all too common.
I consulted at big businesses that KNEW they were getting ripped off (I told them so) chapter and verse BUT the internal politics of the situation were such that nothing could be stopped. Everyone is out to protect, and grow, their own little piece of turf it is really mind boggling. If something is wrong throw more resources at it. On one trip to GM we found 5 different consulting companies involved. A couple of which were "hired" by another consulting company. Each contract was overseen by it's own senior manager and in house bureaucracy. Probably 30 hrs a week was spent in meetings trying to work out differences.
Worked at a Naval site and you wouldn't believe the waste in the IT area of the DoD. Every Admiral, General and bureaucrat had (in their own minds) their own requirements for unique solutions that everyone else was supposed to cater for. God awful all day every day.
#4
California's Departments of Motor Vehicles, Child Support Enforcement, Social Services (welfare divisions), Courts and God know who else could all tell you stories. Government IT cluster fornications historically are like glaciers in Antarctica -- they're unstoppable until they drop into the sea and melt of their own accord.
#5
They way I understand it they had it broken down into regions (as I recall 8 of them) and each region could be handled by a different company and different sets of bureaucratic knots..
Probably very much like the situation you described AlanC - except you have 8 different sets of providers - 8 different [and of course incompatable] designs and sets of interfaces.
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