John Gulliver: Post Office top boss's blind faith in tech a familiar story for the NHS
Digital chaos at the Royal Free
Friday, 12th January — By John Gulliver
The Royal Free’s Andrew Way
THERE have been calls for the tech company Fujitsu to pay out the uncompensated victims of the Post Office scandal, a story that has been thrust into the living rooms of millions of people through the devastating series on ITV.
In many ways, the scandal is a cautionary tale about high-paid chief executives at public-funded organisations lacking knowledge and yet having blind faith in technology.
I am sure the sorry sub-postmaster saga will have chimed with old hands at the Royal Free Hospital, who will recall the disastrous introduction of Fujitsu’s digital patient records system at the Hampstead hospital.
The Free was one of two hospitals in the country chosen as a pilot as part of New Labour ’s National Programme of IT, a programme that would end up being scrapped in what was being called at the time as one of the biggest contracting scandals in British public sector history.
I remember the hospital’s exasperated chief executive Andrew Way spitting blood over the misfiring system allegedly failing to properly bill for NHS work done, losing the trust around £10m.
It led to increased waiting times for patients and required an extra 40 admin staff to be hired just at the Free.
“I had been led to believe it would all work,” he told the BBC in 2009, shortly before resigning and leaving the country to start a new life running a group of hospitals Down Under.