Implementation of new NHS IT systems is to become a non-negotiable part of the local delivery plans (LDPs) of every trust and strategic health authority. Each local health community in England is required to submit a new integrated delivery plan by September.
The new arrangements mean that NHS organisations will now have to give very clear commitments to when they will take new systems from the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) or risk being penalised, while SHAs will have an increased role to play in policing adoption of new systems.
All NHS Chief Information Officers and service modernisation directors have been written to by John Bacon and Richard Jeavons, the DH’s directors of Programmes and Performance and IT Services Implementation respectively, setting out how their organisations will be performance managed on the adoption of new systems.
In a 21 June DH letter Duncan Selbie and Jeavons state: "We are linking this work with the Finance Group that Top Team [SHA CEOs] have established to look at agreeing LDPs and delivering financial balance. We anticipate that the same linkages will be made locally."
In a July interview with E-Health Insider Jeavons commented: "The guidance sets out how we will pull the implementation planning of this programme into the mainstream of local delivery planning."
Step one will require all local health communities develop an integrated Service Improvement Plan (ISIP) which SHAs should sign off by 30 September. This new plan is intended to "outline the LHC’s joint objectives for next 3 years, key enabling workforce, modernisation, finance and IM&T solutions and planned impact on performance".
The second stage of the new planning process says that by the end of March 2006 all local health communities will be required to have reviewed and updated their Service Improvement Plan. This will be based on a new framework due to be issued by Connecting for Health in October.
Because local health communities are not statutory organisations each organisation providing NHS services within in a local health community will have to individually sign off the local integrated Service Improvement Plan.
Jeavons told EHI: “Between October and March all organisations in each SHA area will be asked to complete, as part of their local delivery plan, an implementation plan for the national programme setting out what IT deployment opportunities they want to take, in what order, with what prospective benefits, as part of their overall improvement plan and local delivery plan.”
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