An advisory committee has concluded that the recommended daily calorie limits to maintain a healthy weight, laid down 20 years ago, have been slightly on the low side.In 1991 the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA) set out that the average man should be eating 2,550 calories daily, and the average woman 1,940.

After lengthy consultation, those have now been raised slightly – by a frugal 55 calories for men, but a comparatively generous 139 calories for women.

Which means 2,605 calories a day for men and 2,079 calories a day for women.

Prof Alan Jackman, chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), explained that the old figures were based on “limited available evidence”.

They have been updated to take into account advances in science and better understanding of the physical activity people took.

Sadly, that is where the good news ends.

Speaking at a briefing to launch the Government’s new “ambition” to see obesity levels falling by 2020, Prof Jackman; Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary; and Prof Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer for England, emphasised that this was “not a licence to eat more”.

Prof Jackman said “the majority of adults” already ate much more than the new guideline amounts.

“We estimate that on average the population is eating 10 per cent more than they require,” he said.

Thus, as little over a third of the adult population is now not overweight or obese, only that minority is really entitled to an extra guilt-free indulgence.

Mr Lansley decided to unveil the Government’s new anti-obesity ambition the same day, leading to accusations of mixed messages.

The Health Secretary said Britain had to become a nation of calorie counters.

“People should have a pretty good sense of how many calories they are consuming,” he said.

Department of Health policy officers have calculated that England needs to consume five billion fewer calories daily, to ensure average weights fall to healthy levels.

That equates to enough cheeseburgers to cover 20 football pitches, or enough cafe lattes to fill four Olympic swimming pools, said a spokesman.

But Prof Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said it amounted to “peanuts”.

He added: “Sixteen dry roasted peanuts per person, per day to be precise.”

Like others, he attacked the Health Secretary’s reluctance to use stronger measures to tackle obesity, which already costs the NHS one pound in every 20 it spends.

The Prime Minister last week said a ‘fat tax’ on some foods was “something we should look at”, but yesterday Mr Lansley would only say that while taxes might have “a part to play”, they were not a “first resort”.

But Jamie Oliver, the chef and healthy eatign campaigner, dismissed the whole strategy as a “farce” and a “cop-out”, saying it was “worthless, regurgitated, patronising rubbish”.

He said: “Simply telling people what they already know – that they need to eat less and move more – is a complete cop out.  The country’s bill of health is shocking, and it’s not going to get any better over the next 30 years if a clearly defined plan isn’t put into place soon.”

“We simply can’t afford the financial or health costs of doing nothing. This Government might be able to navigate us slowly out of a recession, but it has no clue about how to make sustainable change in the short or long term, or how to inspire, enforce or empower public health.”

Dr David Haslam, a GP and chair of the National Obesity Forum, said issuing the new calorie guidelines alongside the updated anti-obesity drive was “really unhelpful”.

“It gives out entirely the wrong message,” he said. “People are going to think that they can eat that little bit more. If anything, that will add to the obesity problem.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8825271/Green-light-to-eat-a-little-more-if-you-are-thin.html

Paramedics are to be told if a patient does not wish to be resuscitated or wants to die at home, under plans backed by ministers.Adults in Britain can legally refuse medical treatment, even if it leads to their death but doctors cannot undertake treatment to a patient if it clashes with any clinical judgment.

Patients should, however, be given an opportunity for a second opinion wherever possible.

While the General Medical Council (GMC), the doctor’s watchdog, said last year there was no absolute obligation to prolong life, the medical profession does have a final say about whether resuscitation is in the patient’s best interest.

This has led to accusations from some critics who believe doctors are “playing God” and ignoring vulnerable patients’ right to life.

It has also prompted fears that as hospitals face deeper budget cuts, not resuscitating patients will become a cost-cutting option. It is thought that four in five people who die in hospital are the subject of “do not resuscitate”(DNR) orders.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) attempts to restore breathing or blood flow to those whose heart has stopped beating or who have stopped breathing.

It can include using electric shocks to try to correct the rhythm of the heart, repeatedly pushing down firmly on the patient’s chest and inflating the lungs with a mask or tube inserted into the windpipe.

While television medical dramas suggest it is often successful less than a fifth of those who have had such treatment actually go home, according to the British Medical Association (BMA). Inevitably, the young and fit are more likely to survive than the frail and elderly.

In 2007 the BMA, together with the Resuscitation Council (UK) and the Royal College of Nursing, issued joint guidelines on the issue in a 25 page document titled “decision relating to cardiopulmonary resuscitation”.

Legal experts say the “do not resuscitate” advice is essential where a “patient or their family disagree with doctors about whether a particular treatment is futile, a burden rather than a benefit, or inappropriate”.

Roger Goss, the co-director of Patient Concern, has raised concerns previously that “do not attempt resuscitation” orders are being misused.

“We are concerned that patients are having “do not resuscitate” written on their notes without they or their relatives knowing,’ he said earlier this month.

‘Bearing in mind NHS budget cuts over the next few years, it is not far-fetched to foresee that “do not resuscitate” orders will proliferate to the point where everyone over a certain age — perhaps 65 or 70 — gets one stuck on them.”

In England, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has stopped short of a national policy.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Paramedic-patients-resuscitation-advice-focus-on-current-rules

Controversial reforms to the NHS have avoided a potentially “fatal” delay in the House of Lords, to the relief of ministers.Amid deep concern in the medical profession and among many members of the public, some peers had tried to have the Health and Social Care Bill thrown out or subjected to detailed scrutiny that would have ruined the Government’s timetable.

It is feared by opponents that the wording of the legislation will remove the Secretary of State’s duty to provide healthcare for all, while plans to widen competition will see the back-door privatisation of the NHS.

But following two days of debate by 100 members of the upper house, and pressure applied by ministers and whips to Tories and Lib Dems, attempts to delay or thrown out the Bill were defeated comfortably in the biggest turnouts seen in the Lords for more than a decade.

A motion by Lord Owen, a former health minister and SDP leader, to let a special committee spend until Christmas studying the constitutional impact of the reforms was rejected by a margin of 330 to 262.

Labour’s Lord Rea had wanted the second reading to be refused altogether but this proposal was lost by 354 votes to 220.

Baroness Williams of Crosby, the Lib Dem grandee who had been among the first to raise fears over the Bill, abstained on the critical Lord Owen vote and went with the Government on the Lord Rea motion.

The results means the Bill, which seeks to remove two tiers of NHS management and give more power to GPs and patients, will now be considered line-by-line in committee stage in the Lords and remains on track to receive Royal Assent by next summer.

It has already survived a rebellion by Lib Dem activists in the spring and an unprecedented “pause” in the parliamentary proceedings for doctors’ concerns to be heard, which led to competition plans being watered down.

But even the Government accepts that more changes will be made to contentious areas.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “The vote today moves us one step closer to delivering a world-class health service that puts patients at its heart and hands more power to health professionals. We now look forward to working with the Lords to scrutinise the Bill during Committee Stage to improve our plans further.”

Labour said it would continue to call for “drastic changes”.

The plans had been criticised in the debate by well-known figures including Lord Winston, the fertility pioneer, who described the Bill as “unnecessary and, I’m afraid to say, irresponsible”.

After the vote Dr Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of BMA Council, said: “It remains the BMA position that the Health and Social Care Bill should be withdrawn, or if not that it should be substantially amended, and we will continue to raise our concerns at every available opportunity as the Bill progresses through the House of Lords.

“The BMA continues to have many areas of concern, including the need for assurance that increasing patients’ choice of provider for specific elements of their care won’t be given priority over the development of integrated services and fair access.

“We also need to see an explicit provision that the Secretary of State will retain ultimate responsibility for the provision of comprehensive health services.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/NHS-reform-Bill-survives-fatal-Lords-vote

Denmark has imposed the world’s first “fat tax” in a drive to slim its population and cut heart disease.The move may increase pressure for a similar tax in the UK, which suffers from the highest levels of obesity in Europe.

Starting from this Saturday, Danes will pay an extra 30p on each pack of butter, 8p on a pack of crisps, and an extra 13p on a pound of mince, as a result of the tax.

The tax is expected to raise about £140 million, and cut consumption of saturated fat by close to 10pc, and butter consumption by 15pc.

“It’s the first ever fat-tax,” said Mike Rayner, Director of Oxford University’s Health Promotion Research Group, who has long campaigned for taxes on unhealthy foods.

“It’s very interesting. We haven’t had any practical examples before. Now we will be able to see the effects for real.” The tax will be levied at 2.5 per Kg of saturated fat and will be levied at the point of sale from wholesalers to retailers.

Less than 10pc of Danes are clinically obese, putting them slightly below the European average.

But researchers at Denmark’s Institute for Food and Economic estimate that close to 4pc of the country’s premature deaths are a result of excess consumption of saturated fats.

For Britain, where more than 20pc of the population is obese, the number will be considerably higher.

A 2007 study by Mr Rayner’s group concluded that a combination of taxes on healthy foods and tax breaks on fruit and vegetables could save 3,200 lives a year in the UK.

Health Minister Andrew Lansley has up until now resisted calls for taxes on unhealthy foods, but Mr Rayner said they were the only credible way to combat Britain’s obesity problem.

“I think we’re going to have them in Britain whether Mr Lansley wants them or not, because the obesity crisis in the UK is such that we need to take more action.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Denmark-taxes-fatty-products

Foreign doctors who cannot speak English are to be banned from working in NHS hospitals and clinics, the Health Secretary will announce today.The NHS will introduce mandatory language tests for doctors moving to Britain after training elsewhere in the European Union.

The decision follows a series of cases in which patients have died or suffered poor care as a result of doctors speaking sub-standard English.

The issue was brought to national attention three years ago when Dr Daniel Ubani, a German-trained GP on his first out-of-hours shift in Britain, killed David Gray, 70, by giving him 10 times the normal dose of diamorphine.

In his speech to the Conservative Party conference today, Andrew Lansley will say that the Medical Act will be amended so that doctors must speak good English to practise in Britain.

“I am determined that doctors who come from overseas to work here in our NHS must not only have the right qualifications, but also the language skills to practise here,” the Health Secretary is expected to say. “We will amend the Medical Act to ensure that any doctor from overseas who can’t use a decent level of English is not able to treat NHS patients. This is not about discriminating; we’ve always appreciated how much overseas doctors and nurses give to our NHS. It is simply about our absolute commitment to put patients’ safety first.”

There are more than 88,000 foreign-trained doctors registered to work in Britain, including 22,758 from Europe. They account for almost a third of the total.

Under the proposals, local NHS trusts would have a duty to check the language skills of foreign-trained doctors before they can be employed. In addition, the General Medical Council would be given powers to take action against doctors when there were concerns about their ability to speak English. At present, only doctors from outside the European Economic Area are routinely scrutinised for their language skills before being registered by the GMC.

This means that doctors from Canada or Australia are routinely tested for their language skills while those from countries such as Poland and France are not.

It had previously been thought that European Union laws ensuring the freedom of movement of labour prevented language testing. However, the European Commission has recently stated that the language tests would be legal.

Dr Ubani, who admitted he had never heard of the drug he gave to Mr Gray, was struck off by the GMC in June last year but still practises in Germany. His poor English meant he was refused work by the NHS in West Yorkshire but was accepted in Cornwall and Camb-ridgeshire, where he saw Mr Gray.

Since the case, the GMC and other NHS leaders have repeatedly warned that some foreign doctors’ language skills are so poor that patients are being put at risk.

Compulsory language tests for foreign doctors will raise concerns that the NHS could be left short-staffed, such is its reliance on overseas medics. Ministers believe that the majority will reach the necessary standard of English.

Mr Lansley will today deliver a robust defence of the Government’s health policy, saying that money is being diverted from cutting bureaucracy to front-line services.

“Unlike Labour, we will make sure that every penny of our investment goes right to the patients who matter, not the huge Labour bureaucracy which we inherited,” he will say. “And all that is why, since the election, we now have 1,500 more doctors and 5,000 fewer managers in the NHS.”

He will also claim that hospital infection rates have fallen and the number of people being treated in mixed-sex wards has fallen by more than 90 per cent over the past eight months.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Conservative-Party-Conference-2011-doctors-from-overseas-must-speak-English-or-be-banned

The nanny state banned in England cigarette vending machines over the weekend.The Department of Health said the ban had been introduced to prevent under-age sales to children and to support adults who were trying to quit.

The rest of the UK is expected to implement a similar ban next year.

Some pub landlords say it is a further threat to a livelihood that has already been damaged by the smoking ban.

But Cancer Research and the British Heart Foundation have welcomed the move.

According to the Department of Health, nearly all adult smokers started smoking before they turned 18.  Of the children who regularly smoke, 11% buy their cigarettes from vending machines.

It is also estimated that 35 million cigarettes are sold illegally through vending machines to children every year.

Under the new rules, pub landlords will still be able to sell cigarettes from behind the bar but they must ensure all tobacco advertising on vending machines is removed. Any person found guilty of displaying cigarette adverts on a vending machine could face imprisonment for up to six months, a fine of £5,000, or both.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said smoking was “one of the biggest and most stubborn challenges in public health”, with more than eight million people in England still smoking, causing more than 80,000 deaths each year.

He said: “Cigarette vending machines are often unsupervised, making it easy for children to purchase cigarettes from them.

“The ban on cigarette sales from vending machines will protect children by making cigarettes less accessible to them – we want to do everything we can to encourage young people not to start smoking in the first place.”

Jo Butcher, the National Children’s Bureau’s programme director of health and wellbeing, welcomed the ban and said a person’s lifetime smoking or non-smoking behaviour was “heavily influenced” by decisions in their adolescence.

“Children and young people tell us that external influences make it even more difficult for them to choose healthier lifestyles.

“It’s essential that we create environments that improve health and tobacco legislation is an important part of public health protection and promotion,” she said.
Protection

Charities have also welcomed the ban.

Betty McBride, director of policy and communications at the British Heart Foundation, said thousands of children at risk of this “deadly addiction” regularly got tobacco from vending machines, “which conveniently don’t ask them to prove their age”.

“These children are often blissfully unaware of the damage smoking does to their health and, by the time they realise, they’re hooked.

“Scrapping these machines cuts off an easy source of tobacco for existing young smokers and makes it harder for a new generation to start.

“We’re encouraging landlords to remove machines completely now so they – and any left-over branding – don’t act as dusty old adverts for tobacco,” she said.

Eileen Streets, director of tobacco control at the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, said she hoped the ban would play a “significant part in stopping many children becoming the next generation of lung cancer victims”.

Jean King, of Cancer Research UK, added: “Tobacco kills half of all long-term users and is responsible for one in four cancer deaths.

“Cancer Research UK is determined to protect children from tobacco marketing and through our Out of Sight Out of Mind campaign we are continuing to work for legislation to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.”

But the British Beer and Pub Association described the ban as “an unnecessary measure”.

A spokesman said the machines were there for the convenience of adult customers, and that the association did not believe they played a role in childhood smoking.

Although cigarettes can be sold by bar staff, the spokesman said many pubs would not opt to introduce that, as it raised issues about having a “high-value” item behind the bar and interfered with serving drinks.

Other measures to protect young people from the dangers of smoking are also on the way.

In April 2012, large retailers in England and Scotland will have to get rid of all tobacco displays. Small shops will be expected to comply from April 2015.

Wales and Northern Ireland plan to implement similar regulations.

The government is also due to begin a public consultation before the end of the year on whether to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes in order to lessen their marketing appeal to young people, help make health warnings more effective and help reduce the number of smokers.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15132529

Dismantling Labour’s disastrous £12 billion NHS IT programme may cost taxpayers more than keeping it going.Ministers announced on Thursday that they will speed up the scrapping of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT)  after a review concluded “there can be no confidence that the programme has delivered or can be delivered as originally conceived”.

It confirmed earlier reports that the central part of the scheme, allowing NHS staff across England to access any patient’s details, was unworkable while costs had increases and deadlines were missed.

The governance board of the programme will now be scrapped, and local trusts will be given the freedom to develop their own versions of the electronic care record rather than having the rules dictated by Whitehall. A new Cabinet Office oversight committee will monitor future IT investment to ensure money is not wasted.

But many trusts across England have large contracts with private suppliers to supply their care record systems, and their cancellation could leave taxpayers even more out of pocket.

The Department of Health’s own chief information officer, Christine Connelly, told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee in May that a £3bn deal with CSC to deliver systems in the north, midlands and east of England would cost more to get out of than to keep going.

She said: “Potentially, if you ask me about the absolute maximum, we could be exposed to a higher cost than the cost to complete the contract as it stands today.”

A decision will be made on the future of the contract later in the autumn.

However the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority said that some parts of the £12.7bn programme had worked and would be retained, including the NHSmail email system and the Choose and Book process of arranging hospital referrals.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “Labour’s NHS 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 by local decision-making. This is the only way to make sure we get value for money from IT systems that better meet the needs of a modernised NHS.”

Roger Goss, co-director of the pressure group Patient Concern said: “Thank goodness politicians have decided to stop money being poured into a huge bottomless pit. Now we must pray that they don’t sanction pouring it into endless incompatible regional pits.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Dismantling-NHS-computer-scheme-could-cost-more-money

Patient care is under threat at more than 60 NHS hospitals which are “on the brink of financial collapse” because of costly private finance initiative schemes the Health Secretary warns.Andrew Lansley says he has been contacted by 22 health service trusts which claim their “clinical and financial stability” is being undermined by the costs of the contracts, which the Labour government used extensively to fund public sector projects.

The trusts in jeopardy include Barts and the London, Oxford Radcliffe, North Bristol, St Helens and Knowsley, and Portsmouth.

Between them the trusts run more than 60 hospitals which care for 12 million patients.

There is already evidence that waiting lists for non–urgent operations have begun to rise as hospitals delay treatment to save money. Adding to this are growing fears over the impact of the financial crisis on care this winter.

Under the PFI deals, a private contractor builds a hospital or school. It owns the building for up to 35 years, and during this period the public sector must pay interest and repay the cost of construction, as well as paying the contractor to maintain the building.

However, the total cost of the deals is often far more than the value of the assets. As a result, Mr Lansley says, the 22 trusts “cannot afford” to pay for their schemes, which in total are worth more than £5.4billion, because the required payments have risen sharply in the wake of the recession.

Mr Lansley said: “Over the last year, we’ve been working to expose the mess Labour left us with, and the truth is that some hospitals have been landed with PFI deals they simply cannot afford.

“Like the economy, Labour has brought some parts of the NHS to the brink of financial collapse. Tough solutions may be needed for these problems, but we’ll help the NHS overcome them. We will not make the sick pay for Labour’s debt crisis.”

He said hospitals would not be allowed to collapse financially.

“There are many hospitals that are well run, do not have a legacy of debt and do have projects which are perfectly sustainable. My point is that we have looked since the election and are working together with individual trusts to arrive at a place where they are financially, and in terms of the quality of their services, sustainable for the future. We can only do that if we work closely with them,” he said.

“This is about making very clear that we are not only working on unsustainable PFIs, but also working with legacy debt that the NHS has been left with, working on the IT programmes which were on an unsustainable scale of contractual commitments that didn’t meet the need of the NHS’s customers.

“Across the board, we have to tackle Labour’s legacy of poor value formoney and debt.”

Over the next few weeks, Department of Health officials and executives at the 22 trusts will develop detailed plans for dealing with the crisis. Their proposals are expected to include significant cost–cutting and the renegotiation of PFI contracts.

Money will also be moved from NHS trusts that are in better financial shape to cover the debt costs at those that are struggling. However, officials are braced for the need to use Whitehall funds to bail out some hospitals.

Among the trusts which have contacted Mr Lansley to inform him of their severe financial problems are several London institutions, including South London Healthcare, Barking, Havering and Redbridge, and North Middlesex.

Outside the capital, other trusts to have approached the health department include Wye Valley, Worcester Acute Hospitals, Mid Yorkshire, and Walsall.

After the general election last year, Mr Lansley ordered officials to establish why some NHS hospitals were under–performing. The health department is assessing the financial position of every hospital. It is understood that the PFI costs have emerged as a leading factor in poor patient care in some areas.

The Health Secretary decided to disclose the list of hospitals in difficulty and is expected to announce the rescue plans for each trust next month.

Taxpayers are having to pay more than £200 billion for schools, hospitals and other projects whose capital value is little more than £50 billion.

In one example, a hospital in Bromley, south east London, will ultimately cost the NHS £1.2 billion, more than 10 times what it is worth. Another hospital was charged £52,000 for maintenance that cost £750. The annual cost of the schemes is almost £400 for each household.

The public payments for PFI deals are typically linked to inflation and therefore the cost to taxpayers has increased by up to a third since the beginning of the credit crisis, according to the National Audit Office. Last month, MPs on the Treasury select committee effectively called for a moratorium on new PFI projects, which it said were “like a drug” as the costs were not apparent at the outset.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, has tightened the rules on the deals.

Earlier this year, John Healey, the shadow health secretary, admitted in an interview that Labour ministers had failed when negotiating the multi–million pound schemes for hospitals.

“There is definitely a case for saying we were poor at PFI, poor at negotiating PFI contracts at the outset,” he said.

Companies who run PFI schemes boast profit margins of up to 71 per cent on the projects, but have come under growing pressure from MPs and ministers to return some of their “windfall profits”.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/NHS-hospitals-crippled-by-PFI-scheme

Health secretary Andrew Lansley’s decision to launch groups designed to champion views of patients leads to complaints.
Andrew Lansley’s plans to put the patient at the heart of the NHS have been labelled as “confusing, vague and insulting”.

The health secretary pushed ahead with HealthWatch, the new body to champion patients’ views, despite ministers being forced to apologise and withdraw a consultation on the new watchdog. Ministers had conceded that their original plans had been conceived in haste and without proper consultation.

But Lansley announced that 75 local HealthWatch groups were in place. HealthWatch is supposed to replace local patient involvement networks, known as LINks, in 2012 – bringing “real local democratic accountability and legitimacy” to the NHS “for the first time in 40 years”.

Malcolm Alexander, chair of the National Association of Local Involvement Networks Members, said that, instead of increasing budgets to fund the new bodies, cash was being cut even though the government was asking local groups to take on a range of new responsibilities, such as promoting the integration of care and health services and improving choice for patients, without extra money.

Alexander said: “It’s pathetic. The consultation had a figure of £20,000, which was confusing and looked like a cut. Then that was withdrawn. Our figures show that networks are having their budgets cut this year by 24% on average.”

He said there was no start-up funding for local HealthWatch “pathfinder” groups and no ringfenced money in local authority budgets to run the new bodies.

The money for HealthWatch comes out of local council budgets, which are being cut by 30% over the next four years. “Our own research asked whether these new policies were evolution or abolition. It looks like abolition to us,” he said.

Sally Brearley, senior research fellow in patient and public involvement at King’s College London, who sat on the prime minister’s Future Forum which re-examined the health reforms, said she “shared the concerns”.

“There’s a lot of extra work to develop these new HealthWatch bodies and they are supposed to be monitoring the NHS as services are being cut and finances are under strain. It’s a real issue.”

A Department of Health spokesperson said the criticism was misleading.

“The government has not cut funding, and has no plans to do so – in fact, we retained the current level of funding at £27m, rising in line with inflation, for the spending review period.”

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/andrew-lansley-condemned-healthwatch

The Department of Health should consider abandoning the disastrous £12 billion NPfIT project to computerise all patients’ medical records according to a powerful group of MPs.The integrated electronic care records system was a central part of Labour’s £12 billion National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

The Public Accounts Committee says that although £2.7bn of taxpayers’ money has already gone on the scheme, it is unclear what the benefits have been and so ministers should think about whether the rest of the cash could be better spent elsewhere.

Although the intention was to create a single network that would allow NHS staff across England to access any patients’ details, the report says this will not happen now and the country has been left with a “patchwork” of costly and fragmented IT systems whose future is uncertain because of reforms to the health service.

The chief executive of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, also comes in for criticism for failing to oversee the project properly while civil servants provided “late, inconsistent and contradictory” information to the MPs’ inquiry.

Margaret Hodge, the committee’s chairman, said: “The Department of Health is not going to achieve its original aim of a fully integrated care records system across the NHS. Trying to create a one-size-fits-all system in the NHS was a massive risk and has proven to be unworkable.

“The Department has been unable to demonstrate what benefits have been delivered from the £2.7 billion spent on the project so far.

“It should now urgently review whether it is worth continuing with the remaining elements of the care records system. The £4.3 billion which the Department expects to spend might be better used to buy systems that are proven to work, that are good value for money and which deliver demonstrable benefits to the NHS.”

The integrated electronic care records system was a central part of Labour’s £11bn National Programme for IT in the NHS, which was set up in 2002 and faced repeated criticism since then over its cost and technical problems, most recently from the National Audit Office.

In the report the MPs say the intention to allow rapid sharing of patients’ records was “worthwhile” but the Department of Health has been unable to make it work.

They claim that creating a single system was always a “massive risk” especially as clinicians were not asked for suggestions on its operation.

In the north, midlands and east of England just 10 of 166 trusts have received only a basic system, while no mental health body has received one. Dozens of different interim and local schemes have been devised, at greater cost.

Whitehall officials are said to lack “basic management information” on the number of systems built and their cost, even though there is a body overseeing the whole project with 1,300 staff that has spent £820million.

Sir David Nicholson was accused by the committee of having “lacked the capacity to meet his responsibilities fully” as Senior Responsible Owner for the scheme, leading to “increasing costs and delays”.

The Department of Health is now trying to renegotiate some contracts and is working on a slimmed-down “menu of modules” that hospitals can choose for their patient records systems, but there is no guarantee the systems will work with each other.

In addition, the Strategic Health Authorities responsible for delivery of the programme are being scrapped and there is “considerable uncertainty” over how the new NHS bodies will adopt the IT systems and how much it will cost them.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “This is yet more evidence that Labour’s botched approach to IT in the NHS failed taxpayers and failed patients. Their one-size-fits-all IT programme has once again been found unworkable.

“This Government is taking action where Labour failed. Already, we have reduced expenditure on Labour’s costly IT schemes by £1.3 billion. We are making sure that systems are not imposed on the NHS from the centre which organisations do not want. And we will shortly announce our plans for even stronger action to deliver value for money for taxpayers and the NHS.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/NHS-should-consider-abandoning-7bn-IT-project.html