Inside a leading hospital in Oxford, expensive new computers were humming away just before Christmas when disaster struck. The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre was at the forefront of a multi-billion-pound revolution to modernise the entire computer system of the National Health Service — and the screens had suddenly frozen.

Medical staff looked on in disbelief as they tried to retrieve lost records. “We had only been running the system for a couple of days when it went down,” said one manager. “You would try to get a patient’s records which you knew were there and it just locked you out.”

Although the system was functioning again the next day, some patient files seemed to have disappeared completely. The trust was so alarmed that it sent a report to the National Patient Safety Agency, warning that it had posed a potential risk to patients.

The collapse of the system and further failures led to cancelled operations and a backlog of outpatient appointments. Bob Cullen, 57, a postman who had been referred for treatment by his GP last year, found himself in limbo.

“I was in agony and was on painkillers, as well as taking liquid morphine,” he said. “I was phoning up the Nuffield in so much pain that I hadn’t slept for days and they said ‘We can’t find you on the system’. This was meant to be a hospital with the latest computer systems for patient care and I somehow got lost.”

All new computer systems suffer from “bugs” and the Nuffield’s trust says the problems were merely “glitches”. But to critics of the NHS’s expensive new computer project, Connecting for Health (CfH), the incident was a portent of further trouble.

So concerned are experts that last week 23 senior academics in computer-related science called for a independent review of the project. They fear that the entire scheme is misconceived, overpriced and a waste of billions of pounds.

Last week NHS trusts were facing an estimated deficit of £800m. Staff are being laid off across the country; wards are being closed; patients are being denied potentially life-saving drugs. Yet at the same time the NHS is spending a fortune on a computer system that, critics say, is needlessly expensive.

Even CfH admitted this weekend that the cost of the scheme, now not due to be completed until 2010, could reach £15 billion. Outside experts suggest that £30 billion is more realistic.

It is the largest civilian computer project in the world, designed to transform the NHS into a beacon of electronic wizardry. But could it instead become the mother of all IT disasters while the country’s hospitals remain desperate for cash?

FOR more than 20 years it has been clear that the NHS needed to modernise its information systems to improve patient care and cut delays. The question has always been: how? The initial suggestion under Labour was pragmatic. After a series of reports between 1998 and 2002, advisers recommended an “off-the-shelf” solution which would upgrade and link existing NHS computer systems and buy readily available software.

However, on February 18, 2002 Tony Blair, a self- confessed computer illiterate, chaired a meeting at Downing Street on the NHS and information technology. Alan Milburn, then health secretary, and his officials outlined a bold new plan to link up GPs, hospitals and patients on a much grander scale.

It envisaged a new NHS computer system designed from the top down to hold the records of 50m patients on one huge database. The prime minister was impressed. One of the main advantages, he was told, was the instant access that the scheme offered to patients’ records. A complete medical history could be pulled up on a screen at the touch of a button — from anywhere in the country.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Everyone will get vaccine against swine flu
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes