Health IT supplier CSC confirms redundancies in UK

Software supplier CSC is undertaking another round of redundancies in its healthcare unit ahead of a merger with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services.

The US based company, that was contracted to deliver Lorenzo under the National Programme for IT, has 6,500 employees in the UK.

A spokesperson would not confirm the exact number of UK healthcare jobs that are undergoing redundancy, but said it was proposed to be between 10 and 20 per cent.

In a statement provided to Digital Health News, CSC said: “In order to align skills and resources to the demands of the market, we are restructuring parts of our UK organisation”.

“As a result, we have identified a number of roles that potentially will be made redundant.   We have a voluntary redundancy programme underway and expect the majority of the job reductions to come through this programme.”

The statement added there would be opportunities for employees to reskill, with the potential of joining other areas of CSC’s UK business.

It finished, “throughout the restructuring we are ensuring we continue to meet all of our client commitments”.

She also said that the redundancies would not affect trusts who are using the CSC-supplied Lorenzo electronic patient record.

In May 2014, CSC said it would make 750 UK workers redundant, as part of its “ongoing transformation strategy”, followed by another 750 staff one month later.

This followed job losses in 2012 from staff working on its NHS account, with 500 people made redundant. This announcement led to protests in CSC’s Chesterfield, Chorley, Leeds and Solihull sites.

In May last year, CSC announced its merger with HP Enterprise Services, a company that is a corporate IT solutions company that split off last year from HP.

Digital Health Intelligence lists 160 trusts as using CSC systems, including Lorenozo. Many are a legacy from the company’s time as local service provider for the North, Midlands and East of England as part of the NPfIT.

Lorenzo was developed by iSoft, a company that was later bought by CSC.

Digital Health Intelligence lists 11 NHS trusts as using HP Enterprise systems.

At the time of the merger announcer, HP Enterprise Services’ chief executive Helen Whitman of described it at the time as a “spin-merger” that was part of wider consolidation in the IT industry.

The highest profile trust using HP is Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which uses the service to provide infrastructure and hardware for its eHospital programme.

However, in November last year, repeated outages at the trust led to a “network resilience” review and weekly meetings with senior Hewlett Packard executives.