NHS IT re-organised again

More change for NHS IT

The organisation in charge of the £12.7bn NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is facing yet another shake-up.

Martin Bellamy, previously head of Connecting for Health (CfH), the NHS agency responsible for NPfIT, is moving to the Cabinet Office to head up the government’s G-cloud strategy, a plan announced in last week's Digital Britain report that aims to move all Whitehall IT services to an internal cloud computing environment.

CfH will now become part of the Department of Health Informatics Directorate, and even the name of the agency might be dropped, director general of informatics Christine Connelly told the e-Health Insider web site.

NPfIT has struggled to retain long-term leadership since the departure of NHS IT director general Richard Granger, in January last year. Various people have taken responsibility for the programme only to move on soon after.

“At the moment, the informatics programme is dominated by NPfIT, but when that is done there will be a whole lot of other things we need to do,” Connelly told e-Health Insider.

The Informatics Directorate was set up by the Department of Health in March, as part of a reorganisation that saw major IT leadership roles moved from CfH to the Department. CfH was refocused as a delivery arm, with policy and strategy questions decided by a team reporting directly to Connelly.

In an interview with the BCS in March that was published on Computing.co.uk, Bellamy had been keen to stress the long-term nature of his role.

“The scale of the challenge is massive and we need excellent team work - pulling together - to get it done," he said at the time.