The care of patients on the NHS risks being compromised by the Government’s flawed implementation of a multi-billion-pound computer system linking doctors and hospitals, according to one of the project’s senior executives.

A lack of vision and poor understanding of the sheer size of the task meant that the IT overhaul “isn’t working and isn’t going to work”, Andrew Rollerson, an executive with Fujitsu, one of the system’s providers, said.

In a rare public statement by a key player in the £6.2 billion project, much of which has been shrouded in contractual secrecy, Mr Rollerson said there was a danger that patient care would not be delivered effectively.

The Department of Health has promised that the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) — thought to be the biggest civil IT scheme in the world — will link more than 30,000 GPs in England to hundreds of hospitals by 2012.

Speaking at a conference of IT executives about implementing the scheme, Mr Rollerson, who is reponsible for delivery of professional healthcare services for Fujitsu, said that with the current approach significant problems were inevitable. Fujitsu is one of three companies awarded contracts to provide systems for NHS trusts.

“What we are trying to do is run an enormous programme with the techniques that we are absolutely familiar with for running small projects. And it isn’t working. And it isn’t going to work,” Mr Rollerson said. He added that there was a danger that suppliers would be defeated by the gargantuan size of their “risk-laden” task.

“Unless we do some serious thinking about that — about the challenges of scale and how you scale up to an appropriate size — then I think we are out on a limb.”

His comments, reported to-day in Computer Weekly, mark the first time that anyone from an existing software provider has so publicly criticised the programme, which is overseen by Connecting for Health, a government agency.

Fujitsu distanced itself from the comments, saying that Mr Rollerson was not in an executive position nor directly connected with the NHS contract — despite his billing as the company’s head of healthcare con-sultancy practice at the Successful Implementation of NPfIT 2007 conference.

The programme — now in its fifth year — is running up to two years behind schedule for the creation of a centralised medical records system for 50 million patients, as well as an online booking system for hospital appointments, facilties for e-prescriptions, digitally stored X-ray images and computer links between NHS organisations. The National Audit Office predicted last year that the total cost of the project would be £12.4 billion, but said that suppliers would bear the brunt of costs for the delays.

Fujitsu has signed a deal worth £896 million to supply systems in the South and BT is responsible for London. A third company, Computer Science Corporation Alliance, which oversees the programme in the North West and West Midlands, took over the the programme’s remaining “regional clusters” after Accenture pulled out of contracts worth £2 billion for the North East and East of England.

A spokesman for Accenture would not be drawn on whether Mr Rollerson’s comments reflected its own costly experience with the programme. Accenture suffered a 67 per cent profits drop last year, but the company retained £110 million of the £173 million it had previously been paid by the NHS.

Mr Rollerson said that there was a “gradual coming apart of what we [as service providers] are doing on the ground because we are desperate to get something in and make it work, versus what the programme really ought to be trying to achieve”.

Although Mr Rollerson did not directly criticise Connecting for Health, he said that the “visionary leadership” for the project was still missing. “There is a belief that the national programme is somehow going to propel transformation in the NHS simply by delivering an IT system,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. A vacuum, a chasm, is opening up. It was always there.”

Fujitsu said that Mr Rollerson’s presentation was in support of the national programme.”

Connecting for Health declined to comment.

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