The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) can trace it's origins back to the Information for Health strategy

The programme has its origins as far back as 1998. A Department of Health strategy called Information for Health aimed at providing electronic health records for patients, online access to patient records for clinicians and information about best clinical practice for all.

A further plan was produced in 2001 which outlined the information and IT developments which needed to be implemented in the NHS and further recommendations were made for IT use in the service.

These included a commitment to IT spending, nationally controlled standards and better management of IT implementation including a national programme.

Later that year the Department for Health outlined its own report, ‘Delivering 21st Century IT Support for the NHS’, which laid the foundations for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) which came to fruition later the same year.

Managed by Connecting for Health, a government body formed to deliver the programme, the NPfIT was intended to be a single electronic records system for 50 million patients in England.

Its other aims were to provide electronic prescriptions and other services. It would also connect 30,000 GPs to 300 hospitals ‘providing secure and audited access to these records by authorised health professionals’.

Connecting for Health has referred to NPfIT as ‘the world’s biggest civil information technology programme’. The programme has an estimated budget of £12.7bn and it is thought to be the largest non-military IT project in the world