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Chief executive of Whittington Health, Dr Yi Mien Koh, explains to Jessica Fuhl that the biggest challenge to integration and efficiency is getting staff on board Whittington Health has ambitions plans for the future. It hopes to achieve foundation trust status by 2014 and its first step to ensure it made sufficient efficiency savings in order to do so was to fully integrate local community services with the hospital last year. In January it had reached 98% of its cost improvement programme (CIP) target for the financial year as a result. The integrated health organisation is a merger of the formerly...

Former health secretary and chair of health select committee says that better use of IT will help eliminate waste in the NHS, reports Gill Hitchcock When the Audit Commission published its review of England's NHS this summer and warned of growing financial pressures, trusts already knew that achieving savings equivalent to about 5% of their budgets each year until 2015 meant doing things differently and more efficiently. Stephen Dorrell, the chair of the health select committee and former health secretary, believes making better use of IT is key to eliminating inefficiencies in the NHS, but...

The government's apparent ending of the NHS IT programme leaves NHS CfH and its BT and CSC contracts unaffected, writes SA Mathieson The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) seems destined to survive several political deaths, including the one announced today. The Daily Mail, reporting the scrapping of a £12bn NHS computer system, quotes health secretary Andrew Lansley as saying: "Labour's IT programme let down the NHS and wasted taxpayers' money by imposing a top-down IT system on the local NHS, which didn't fit their needs. We will be moving to an innovative new system driven...

Following sustained criticism of the National Programme for IT, the government is absorbing NHS computing into the state sector mainstream Amid the embarrassment and recrimination following the latest damning report into the English NHS's National Programme for IT (NPfIT), one outcome is certain. No longer will the NHS be able to set its own IT policy, distinct from the rest of the public sector. Even before Parliament's public accounts committee (PAC) reported on the dismal progress of care records systems in secondary care , the Cabinet Office had already taken the NHS under its wing...

The Department of Health will not compel patients to use digital channels to communicate with government, says its technology head Paul Jones The government's policy of compelling citizens to contact public services through digital channels will not apply to healthcare, according to Department of Health's chief technology officer. Paul Jones, one of the architects of the health service's Information Revolution strategy, is expected to tell the Smart Healthcare Live conference this week that the Cabinet Office's "digital by default" mantra will not be imposed on NHS patients...