By Tony Collins
CSC is due to meet officials from the Cabinet Office next month to discuss a possible new deal over the company’s £3bn worth of NHS IT contracts. Proposals from the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group have gone to the Department of Health and Downing Street for approval.
Nobody seems to know yet what the ERG has proposed but CSC remains confident that a new NPfIT deal will be signed that is good for the supplier’s finances and for the NHS. Not all Whitehall officials share CSC’s confidence, however.
A new deal may be signed – but perhaps without the exclusive arrangements in the original contracts and the NHS commitments to place a minimum amount of business with the company.
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It surprises me that this issue is still in debate, the following link is to the original CfH document which describes the tendering process and, therefore one assumes, the terms which should be reflected in the awarded LSP contracts
Click to access npfit_tendering_process.pdf
note
Appendix 1
Key Commercial Principles
3. Service Obligations
4. Implementation of ICRS (integrated care record service)
5. Service Levels and service deductions
6. subcontractors
9. 10. and 11
13. Authority Responsibilities and Excusing Causes
14. General Pricing Principles
16. Intellectual Properly – get rid of CSC / BT and contract directly for support, that’s what this means, their threats are empty.
18 Benchmarking – one would have assumed that such benchmarks were set at a minimum level which existing systems could achieve to ensure that the new systems were a step forward. In the case of RiO replacing MARACIS at Oxford at the time they were forced to sign MARACIS could support 450 concurrent users RiO barely 200.
22 Remedies for breach – none of this was ever done with CSC I bet, sub section viii we would be happy to step in 🙂
23. Step in Rights: could this term mean that the existing LSP’s posed a direct threat to patient care / safety?
24 Terminations Rights – CSC could contract could be terminated on the basis of sub points ii,iii,iv and v
26 Liability – there is no way it would cost more to cancel that’s just spin.
Given what was stated at the PAC by the witnesses and what’s been going on before I am astonished at what can be found on a simple Google search. This is a CFH document which describes the nature of the LSP contract and defines how they are to be managed. In this case the LSP’s have not been managed at all, nor will they be if allowed to continue as is. I am not a lawyer but for once I do not think one needs to be.
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