GPSoC delivery goes local in IT devolution

Local NHS organisations will be required to draw up plans showing how they will deliver GP Systems of Choice implementation under new arrangements announced today.

Primary care trusts, as commissioners, will be required to have their own comprehensive IM&T plan and work with all providers in their local health communities to align IM&T plans to enable patient-centred service transformation.

The new requirements are part of a broad strategy of devolving responsibility for IM&T to local level announced in ‘The NHS in England: the operating framework for 2007-8’. 

The framework was launched by NHS chief executive, David Nicholson, who says in his foreword: “We are devolving power from the centre to the service in many ways, not least in how we allocate money, such as the unbundling of central budgets.

“Some of the key enablers of service transformation, such as the delivery of information technology, will also increasingly need to be driven and owned by the service rather than from the centre so that patients can get the full benefits as quickly as possible.”

Nicholson is currently reviewing the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and reports suggested he was keen to improve local ownership of the programme. The framework confirms that this is officially the way ahead.

It says that the vision set out by the strategy ‘Delivering 21st century IT support for the NHS’ will be achieved by improving NHS IM&T and service transformation capability, placing ownership of the national programme under the NPfIT Local Ownership Programme, and by the NHS making sustained local investment.

Plans will be required from NHS organisations showing not only how local but national priorities will be achieved. These include: the completion of picture archiving and communications rollout; implementation and benefits realisation for the Electronic Prescriptions Service and further exploitation of e-booking

The framework also says plans should show how organisations will carry out the deployment and benefits realisation for patient administration systems and order communications and results functionality, in line with existing commitments and targets set by each SHA, in the context of existing commercial arrangements.

The broad planning local NHS organisations will be required to do is set out, though the framework says more detailed guidance will be issued shortly.

In a dditon to the responsibilities set out for PCTs, as commissioners, all NHS providers will have to have a forward looking IM&T plan which is “core to their business, exploits fully the NPfIT opportunity and thereby demonstrates migration to the NHS Care Record Service.”

Strategic health authorities will be charged with assuring that the local NHS has the capability and resources to deliver their plans.