NHS care record rollout grinds to a halt

London roll out of care records scheme to be halted will problems are ironed out

Only four hospitals have gone live in London

NHS trusts in London have admitted that they are revising dates to go-live with electronic care records systems after media reports this morning that the £12.7bn programme had ground to a halt.

An article in the Financial Times reported that London trusts were reluctant to install care records systems after seeing the significant problems encountered by trusts that had already done so.

And an early adopter site for the care record system in Morecambe Bay was due to go live in June but has failed to do so.

There are no published plans as of yet for when two other early adopter sites in the North of England will go live.

Connecting for Health (CfH) plans for the next three months show do not include go-live dates for the patient record software at any trust.

A spokesman for CfH said the early adopter sites in the north felt it was important to resolve technical issues before rushing ahead with go-lives.

NHS London admitted that all four NHS trusts in London that had gone live with the software were having problems and that a joint decision had been taken with supplier BT to get these issues resolved before any more trusts went live with the system.

"Meetings will be taking place over the next couple of weeks with the London trusts to discuss the implementation dates and NHS London and those trusts hope to have revised dates as soon as possible," said a spokesman.

It was also expected that BT would take over the southern region of the programme after supplier Fujitsu dropped out, but a contract price has yet to be agreed – slowing the progress of the care records system in that region too.

Connecting for Health insisted the care records scheme was delayed rather than halted and pointed out that other parts of the £12.7bn scheme were operating successfully.

Shadow minister for health Stephen O'Brien said the news had prompted the conservatives to undertake their own review of the scheme.

"As the Government is not prepared to be accountable for this, the Conservatives have secured the opportunity to undertake our own independent review which is now progressing with the rigour people would expect, given the amount of taxpayers' money at stake," he said.