A further £2 billion is being sought to fund the NHS National Programme for IT into 2006 and 2007, according to a report in the Financial Times. The report comes as the service and its healthcare IT suppliers await news of the seven contract awards due to be made for the NHS data spine, local service providers to serve five geographical clusters in England and N3, a new national infrastructure. So far £2.3 billion has been announced to support the programme’s work up to 2005. However, the impending contracts will run for 10 years, so a considerable uplift in IT spending is likely to be needed to fund them and to sustain the modernisation that flows from them. The FT reports that NHS IT director-general, Richard Granger, has been in talks with health secretary, John Reid, who is in charge of a five year settlement for the NHS that will double overall spending from £50 billion to £100 billion by 2008. In addition to money allocated nationally to the programme, the Department of Health estimates that trusts in England spend around £850m locally on IT. How much this will have to rise as a result of the national programme has been debated in the E-Health Insider forum, Paying for the National Programme.
