£12bn NHS computer system brought to halt by glitches

By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent

THE roll-out of a flagship £12 billion NHS computer system has ground to a halt in many parts of the country due to technical problems, the NHS admitted yesterday.

The ambitious project, which is already four years late, has been dogged with problems from the start.

Ministers want the computer programme, one of the largest in the world, to contain the medical records of every patient in the country. But NHS leaders in London have decided to halt its implementation indefinitely in order to tackle technical hitches.

And in the South the NHS is still struggling to find a replacement after Fujitsu pulled out of a contract in May, meaning no hospitals in that area are preparing to adopt the records system.

Last month NHS bosses attempted to resolve a damaging row over the confidentiality of medical records by agreeing that patients would have to "opt in'' rather than "opt out'' of the system, as had been originally planned.

Managers at the Royal Free Hospital Trust in London have struggled with the new software, prompting NHS London to halt the project. A spokesman for NHS London said: "The important thing is to get this right.''

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat's health spokesman, said the IT programme was fatally hampered by its scale. "This huge centralised project has been a shambles from the start,'' he said. "Now is the time for a radical rethink.''

A spokesman for NHS Connecting for Health, which oversees the implementation of all new computer systems in the health service, insisted that the problems did not indicate that the introduction of computerised care records had halted. He said: "Many elements of the National Programme for IT are advancing and some are complete.''