Consultation on National Health Service Trusts

Part of Orders of the Day — National Health Service and Community Care Bill – in the House of Commons at 5:15 am on 13 March 1990.

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Photo of Robin Cook Robin Cook , Livingston 5:15, 13 March 1990

My hon. Friend illustrates the other side of the contract. Not only will hospitals have to get the costs right, because every penny coming to the hospital will come by way of contracts, but patients will get into the hospital only if there is still room in the contract for additional patients.

I was stating that five of the six hospitals in the resource management initiative decided that they needed more time before they could price a contract before April 1991. The one exception was Arrowe Park hospital in the Wirral. It expressed polite interest in the concept and was on the first list of hospitals listed as having an interest in self-governing status. That hospital has dropped out of the first division of that list. None of the hospitals that have experienced the resource management initiative computer system now want to opt out. All the hospitals that are seeking to opt out have no experience of that computer system.

Therefore the Secretary of State has produced a fall-back system. He has three pilot projects for a computer system known, appropriately, as HIS—hospital information systems. All those pilot projects are in deep trouble. I notice from the latest issue of Computer Weeklythat two companies that were bidding for the system have now withdrawn. Many of the firms that did not bid, such as ICL and Istel, claim that the plans were overambitious with too short time scales between tendering and supply.