Richard Bacon MP - Member of Parliament for South Norfolk

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Allow hospitals more choice on NHS IT says MP

Commenting on the termination of Fujitsu’s NHS IT contract, Richard Bacon MP, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, said today:

“It's time the Department of Health stopped forcing NHS trusts to wait for triple-decker buses that haven’t left the drawing board”..

“It could be months before the Department of Health, NHS Connecting for Health and various people with different views within the NHS decide what to do about Fujitsu's withdrawal. The decision on what happens next ought to be made without unnecessary delay, and it should be made around the need to put buying decisions back into the hands of NHS trusts”.

“NHS Connecting for Health had the sense to sign a contingency framework contract so that other suppliers could be let into the market. My hope now is that the Department of Health will make use of that contract to let hospital trusts buy from a range of suppliers”.

“The original approach of handing over monopolies to a handful of local service providers was never going to work and has been shown not to work”.

“The last thing we need is for Fujitsu's contract to be passed on to another local service provider. That will only perpetuate the existing monopolies and delay further the modernisation the NHS so badly needs. It would mean more of the same”.

“The NHS national IT programme has cost so far nearly £4 billion, and I have to question whether most of that money has been well spent. Ministers should put aside the politics of pretending all is well, and they should not give in to the temptation to say that the programme is working just because it’s contractually fairly easy to swap one supplier for another. You can swap suppliers indefinitely and never have a working national programme”.

29 May 2008

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