Royal Berkshire 'may walk' from NHS IT programme

The chairman of the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has said the trust “may walk” from the NHS IT Programme, to ensure it gets the IT systems required.

Speaking last Thursday, the day after Fujitsu had its £1.1 billion NHS IT contract for the South terminated, Colin MacLean the chairman of Royal Berks said it was “very worrying” the NHS IT programme had ground to a halt in the region.

Royal Berks has experienced repeated delays in receiving an electronic patient record system – or Care Records Service – from Fujitsu under the £12.7bn NHS IT programme. With Fujitsu no longer leading the programme in the South the trust now has no immediate prospect of getting a new patient IT system.

As a result the chairman said the Foundation Trust (FT) was now working up a Plan C based on going it alone. Foundation Trusts are strongly encouraged to take NPfIT systems but their independent status means they are not required to

“Plan A was to try to work with the national programme, Plan B was to start propping up our own IT systems and to continue working with the national programme, and just over six months ago we were made aware that we needed to start thinking about a Plan C to go out on our own,” MacLean was quoted as saying.

“The board has not made a decision to walk yet but it might make such a decision quite soon, maybe at our next meeting,” he added.

According to the Reading Evening Post MacLean told Thursday’s Foundation Trust governors’ meeting that after Fujitsu had “walked away from the programme” leaving the situation “up in the air” with no decisions yet taken. The trust later confirmed the chairman's remarks to E-Health Insider. 

MacLean was further quoted as saying, “The gossip, for what it is worth, is that the two alternative providers would be BT and iSoft but there is a lot of concern about that from the point of view of the governing council and this is a big worry.”

The chairman told the governors’ meeting that good IT was essential to the organisation and the lengthy delays to the NPfIT programme had already led the FT to start examining alternatives

“If we want to be a forward-looking trust we need a decent IT system. We have been waiting for this to happen for a while and so the board has already been looking at the options in case we needed to go somewhere else.”

Trust Chief executive Professor Ann Sheen said in a written response to E-Health Insider: “I can confirm the trust chairman's remarks to a meeting of our Council of Governors. As you would expect with any project, trusts have contingency plans in place as we must be diligent in our duty to patients.” She added the trust was “working together with NHS Connecting for Health to take our plans forward."

Trust board papers from Royal Berks show that contingency planning for delays to the NPfIT CRS were begun in January 2007, when the trust was also suffering significant delays. It had hoped to begin implementation by November 2007 at the latest.