The politics of NHS IT

The economy demands efficiency savings – and when politicians say efficiency savings they mean cuts. Nobody will dare to make cuts on the NHS ‘frontline’ - so they must come in the form of back-end procurement, administration and so on. The 'and so on' is the really important bit, and could cover anything from scaling back on NHS IT projects (as Labour talked about in its manifesto) to abolishing NHS Connecting for Health entirely (as the Liberal Democrats promised).