THE introduction of a multibillion-pound NHS computer system is at risk because staff involved in its implementation feel demoralised, a study published in the British Medical Journal says.

Researchers from the Department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine interviewed 23 senior managers and clinical staff involved in Connecting for Health, formerly the National Programme for IT, at four major hospital trusts. Frontline staff felt disengaged in the process by the lack of consultation from Connecting for Health headquarters, research found.

The report concluded that this posed a threat to getting the programme up and running by 2007 as planned, despite an extra £2.3 billion being allocated to the programme in 2002 to speed up implementation.

The aim is for electronic patient records to be introduced in all acute NHS trusts within two years.

The researchers said that, despite the extra money, staff were uncertain about when the IT systems would be implemented in hospitals and what funding would be available locally to support this. They said that this uncertainly was deterring trusts from getting on with implementing local support systems. The researchers found that some trusts said that existing IT systems for radiology and pathology services urgently needed replacing, but that these had been put on hold as the IT programme was phased in across the country.

The bill for implementing Britain’s most expensive IT project was estimated at £6 billion, but there are fears that it could rise to £30 billion over the next decade. At £3 billion a year, the cost is equivalent to almost half the current annual increases in government spending on the health service.

Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, said: “Large-scale public IT projects do not have a good record in the UK and so it is paramount that the NHS learns the lessons of history and engages wherever possible with the frontline staff who will be using the new systems to deliver better patient care.”

A spokesman for Connecting for Health said that the study had pre-empted a campaign to be started next month to engage staff in the project.

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