It is a truth, insufficiently acknowledged, that whenever the central government organises something, it wastes money and people. The cost is borne by taxpayers who, these days, include many who are relatively poor. It therefore follows that the process of having the government organise things is automatically to cause the relatively poor to be taxed more heavily.
The most extreme, single demonstration of the waste perpetrated by government is the computerisation of the NHS. The whole appallingly wasteful exercise, costing billions of pounds to taxpayers, appears to have started with the wholly ignorant, amateur idea of one politician: Mr Tony Blair.
Here, from the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, is an account of how he made this very important decision and how effective the actions he started have been:
Elated by the prospect of prescriptions pinging into patients' e-mail accounts, of ridding surgeries of yellowing records and A&E departments of carbon paper, Mr Blair, according to one observer, had "a Tony moment". With a wave of his hand, he gave the go-ahead for the biggest public sector IT project the world has seen - a scheme which has now become one of the biggest IT turkeys the world has seen.The plan would link more than 30,000 GPs with 300 hospitals. "Up to 600 million pieces of paper a year" would be saved, Mr Blair promised. Patients' notes would be available in any hospital at the click of a mouse, and GPs would be able to book hospital appointments over the internet ("choose and book"). The Prime Minister even joked about making GPs' handwriting "legible for the first time in history".
Four years later, the joke is on Mr Blair, and the taxpayer. The "Connecting for Health" project is two years behind schedule and more than three times over its initial £6.2 billion budget. Lord Warner, the health minister, revealed this week that the real cost of the programme would approach £20 billion by 2010, its revised delivery date.
A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) is expected to be damning, suggesting that corners were cut so that political deadlines could be met. More than £11.75 million of taxpayers' money has been lavished on consultants, including Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse Coopers, PA Consulting, Cap Gemini and IBM.Yet the glitzy, "joined-up" NHS remains a low-tech hotch-potch. Doctors are largely unimpressed. Dr Richard Vautrey, a GP in Leeds and spokesman for the British Medical Association on IT, has struggled for months, for example, to get "choose and book" working.
It should enable GPs to offer patients a choice of four hospitals but has been beset by technical difficulties. "It does work in some places, but we haven't been able to get it to," says Dr Vautrey.
Certain hospitals, mindful of waiting-time targets, are also refusing to make appointments available.
With its 950-strong staff and an annual wage bill of about £50million, Connecting for Health does not lack resources. Still, it has become the latest in a series of public sector IT fiascos which include the Passport Office, Air Traffic Control, the Child Support Agency and the Inland Revenue.
See also the accompanying article which begins:
It is very unclear how the NHS is going to find the money to pay for the National Programme for IT. A project that was supposed to cost £5billion and last less than three years is now due to cost £20billion and last at least a decade.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS • Waste in public services
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