The Secretary of State Alan Milburn used his speech to the NHS Confederation conference on Friday to give the strongest commitment yet that major additional investment is to be channelled into NHS IT.
As part of a wide-ranging speech on NHS modernisation and the challenge facing NHS managers, Milburn told delegates at Harrogate that later this summer the Government will introduce a nationally run IT programme backed by heavy investment.
He identified IT as one of the core areas where greater help from the centre was needed to enable local organisations take advantage of the expansion of NHS capabilities.
“As far as IT is concerned we urgently need to reverse almost two decades of failed attempts to modernise the NHS core infrastructure,” said Milburn. "So I can tell this conference today that later this summer we will bring forward a nationally run IT programme which will be backed by large scale investment."
He stressed that while the NHS Plan was based on devolving power and resources any large organisation will need some functions to be undertaken centrally. "The Department of Health will focus on setting strategic objectives, determining standards, distributing and accounting for resources and securing the integrity of the overall system through for example workforce planning and better IT."
Equally significant for the IT industry was the Secretary of State’s clear commitment to fully drawing on the resources, capabilities and skills of the commercial sector to build up the capacity of the NHS.
"The biggest constraint the NHS faces is shortages of capacity. So I can tell this conference today that in addition to sustained growth in existing NHS provision, we will bring new providers from overseas into this country in order to further expand elective services for NHS patients."
Though Milburn was referring to bringing in private sector providers for provision of elective surgery, the same principle looks set to apply in rapidly expanding NHS IT capacity and capabilities.
And Milburn made clear that involving new players would not be a short-term fix, but instead part of the new NHS system. "These new providers will become a permanent feature of the new NHS landscape," stressed Milburn.
The speech also contained pledges to cut the amount of guidance and monitoring by the centre and reduce the requirement on local NHS organisations to submit scores of plans to the DH every year.
"We will be working with the NHS to review the number of these plans with a view to cutting their numbers by at least two thirds," said Milburn.