Managers have attacked the Connecting for Health IT project for 'bullying' people into talking down problems on the ground.
West Herts primary care trust IM&T service manager Roz Foad was among speakers at an IT conference who criticised the scheme to create an NHS-wide clinical computer system.
She told HSJ: 'There is a bullying aspect to Connecting for Health.' Local staff felt unable to voice their concerns, she added. 'We are not allowed to put out anything that is not spin, but the only real progress that is being made is with existing systems.'
Ms Foad told the audience of managers and IT contractors that CFH was disrupting the work of GPs and PCTs at a time when trusts were already under huge pressure due to mergers and redundancies.
Barnsley PCT chief executive Ailsa Claire said the project was focusing on the wrong issues.
'The largest users of our services are elderly people who need integrated health and social care records but that is very far down the agenda.' NHS modernisation aimed to provide patient-centred care, she believes, but CfH did not follow that ethos. 'These systems are designed to be efficient for businesses to talk to each other, not for clients to control their own care,' she said.
Cash-strapped PCTs were unable to provide the investment needed locally. 'My PCT spends 2 per cent on IT. What we should be [spending] is about 4 per cent but that is very difficult,' Ms Claire added.
Ms Foad said cuts in PCT budgets ordered by the Department of Health had made it difficult to respond to the increased demands of CfH initiatives: 'My engineers are now tied up with choose and book issues so they are taken away from supporting GP systems. I have no money to pay them overtime.'
But Dr Simon Eccles, CfH national lead for hospital doctors, said progress was being made, with 275,000 NHS staff using patient care records and 1.3 million appointments made under choose and book.
He rejected concerns about confidentiality: 'We are not pinning people's information to a notice board and inviting the whole NHS to see it. Your clinic clerk will not have the same access as a doctor.'
Computer scientist Professor Colin Tully warned that there was a lack of scrutiny of the programme, meaning mistakes would go unnoticed: 'This affects everyone in the country and 1 million NHS workers. We cannot just impose a solution on all our citizens and NHS staff.'
Professor Tully, of Middlesex University, is one of a group of eminent computer scientists who have demanded a public inquiry into CfH. He said the group would shortly issue a response to health minister Lord Warner's rejection of its demand.
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