NHS £12 bn IT programme 'vision will not be realised' - NAO

Connecting for Health, the £12 billion national IT programme for the NHS launched in 2002, is in serious trouble according to the National Audit Office, and might have to be scrapped.

Billed as the world’s largest civilian IT infrastructure project, its primary objective was to provide an electronic care record for every patient. Since patients could find themselves being treated in a wide variety of different settings, by a growing number of clinical specialists, it was becoming increasingly important to ensure that they all had access to the record of care.

This would reduce the costs of repetitive examinations, and enable a much more effective collaboration between generalists and specialists. To those involved in population medicine, and public health specialists dealing with epidemics, access to an entire population’s health records promised a rich seam for research. Drug companies were hovering like vultures, awaiting new data on prescribing patterns and disease trends.

But now comes the NAO’s a stark conclusion: "The original vision for the national programme for IT in the NHS will not be realised. The NHS is now getting far fewer systems than planned despite the Department [of Health] paying contractors almost the same amount of money. This is yet another example of a department fundamentally underestimating the scale and complexity of a major IT-enabled change programme.”

But there’s a lot more to it than that. Before the programme was launched, hundreds of people across Europe and the USA, including clinicians and information specialists - those close enough to unravel the complexity of the project - had been working on the project for years. They were developing the standards needed to provide the development path that would ensure information could be shared across the multiplicity of systems that had been already installed in health care and those yet to be developed.

What the NAO doesn’t do is to judge the consequences of the decision by the New Labour government to hand the entire programme over to the private sector. Decades of work on standards were thrown away.

In 2003-04, the health department awarded five 10-year contracts totalling some £5 billion to four suppliers for the delivery of local care records systems: Accenture in the East and in the North East; BT in London; Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in the North West, and West Midlands; and Fujitsu in the South. The aim was for detailed care records systems to be delivered to all NHS trusts and GP practices (excluding GP practices in the south) by the end of 2007, with increased functionality and integration added until full implementation was complete in 2010.

The naïve expectation from the new project leaders was that the competing suppliers, with little or no knowledge of health care systems, would talk amongst themselves to develop the standards needed to enable records to be shared across all systems.

Now only BT and CSC remain in the game. Whilst the broadband communications infrastructure is up and working, and x-ray and other images are routinely transmitted, and many patients are offered a choice of where they go for hospital treatment, as the NAO says, the care record is unachievable.

After years of missed deadlines, incomplete and inadequate systems and adjustments to the specifications and contracts, the outcome is an indictment of both New Labour’s cosy relationship with the business sector and the failure of market-led solutions.

New Labour effectively gave IT contractors a licence to print money as part of the introduction of the market into health care. Next came foundation hospitals that were run like commercial organisations. You don’t have to be a genius to see where the ConDem government got its inspiration for NHS competition from.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
www.aworldtowin.net

Glencore: One corporation's power over life and death

Until now the largest and wealthiest commodities trader in the world, notorious for tax avoidance, has managed its murky business in the shadows. But it needs capital to fuel its growth, hence its launch on the London stock market today.

Most people on the planet will not have heard of Glencore, but virtually all are only too well aware of the inflationary effects of its control of a wide range of commodities. Glencore controls 60% of the world’s trade in zinc and 50% in copper.

According to the World Bank’s Food Price Watch, since June 2010, an additional 44 million people fell below the $1.25 poverty line as a result of higher food prices. In March 2011, the food index remained 36% above its level a year earlier.

Even the notoriously right-wing Daily Mail is disturbed by Glencore’s power over life and death. A special investigation says:

Its empire stretches from the jungles of Colombia to the plains of Australia. It makes its money from metals, minerals, oil, sugar, grain — commodities that form the very building blocks of world trade. And, armed with the best possible knowledge of global events, its traders buy these at the lowest possible price and sell at the highest possible mark-up.

With its share issue – the biggest-ever in London – Glencore is now drawing together many more threads in the global web of capital consolidation that is driving food and fuel inflation and forcing tens of millions over the edge into starvation.

Everyone who is anyone in the exploitation of the planet and its people wants to get in on the game of building profit from starvation. Aabar, a unit of Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company is set to be its largest external investor, taking $1 billion. GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, will take $400m. Fund managers BlackRock and Fidelity, are set to take $360m and $215m, respectively. Swiss banks Credit Suisse, UBS and Pictet will also take part. Zijin Mining, the Chinese group, will buy as well as several other institutional investors, including hedge funds Och Ziff, Eton Park and York Capital. The launch brings huge fees to the banks which underwrite it. The group is led by global co-ordinators Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley.

Commodity speculation took off in a big way in the wake of the 2007/8 global financial meltdown. In a co-ordinated panic action, governments and central banks threw billions of every currency onto the world’s credit markets trying to stave off the inevitable recession. But with banks refusing to lend, a great deal of the money found its way into the commodity markets, driving price inflation way beyond the effects of demand and supply pressures.

In 2003, the commodities futures market amounted to just $13 billion. But when the global financial crisis hit, commodities – including food – seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture said. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was rolling the markets. From 2003 to 2008, the volume of index fund speculation increased by 1,900%.

But speculation is not the only cause of inflation in food and fuel. Severe weather vents induced by climate change, increased competition for food and land especially from China, increasing costs of production as oil reaches its peak. And the switch to bio-fuel also contributes to the underlying pressures that Glencore and the other speculators feed upon.

A small, and now declining, number of global corporations driven by profit for the benefit of shareholders, have brought the planet to the limits of its ability to support life, and its people to the limits of their ability and willingness to endure its effects.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor
www.aworldtowin.net