IT supplier hits back over who is to blame for NHS cancer screening fiasco
THE IT company involved in the breast cancer screening scandal hit back last night at suggestions that its software was to blame.
Senior sources at Hitachi Consulting said that it had created an algorithm following the exact specifications provided by health officials.
They also questioned why Public Health England (PHE) failed to act after the firm first flagged up concerns in March 2017 that women were being denied scans. Until now, PHE had defended itself by insisting that it had been informed by Hitachi that the problems were localised.
But a well-placed source at the consulting company said: “In March 2017, this was escalated to senior officials at PHE. They didn’t call it up.”
A separate source close to the breast screening programme told The Daily Telegraph that any suggestion of an IT blunder was ill-founded. The source blamed the problem on the specification provided to the computer software firms by the NHS. “The programme was doing exactly what it was supposed to,” said the source, “It was programmed to the correct specification.”
Up to 450,000 women aged 68 to 71 who were eligible for breast cancer screening checks were denied mammograms as a result of an error that went unspotted for almost a decade. Around 140,000 of them have since died.
Health officials have now embarked on efforts to contact around 300,000 women in their seventies, with the first letters sent out this week.
The IT source said the problem was caused by health officials providing the wrong instructions in the first place, setting the wrong age cut-off point for the programme.
The source said: “It’s like asking a video recorder to record programmes every Thursday and then complaining it didn’t record Tuesday’s television.”
A Hitachi spokesman said: “Hitachi Consulting has no responsibility for the error that has led to this situation... and has had no responsibility for decisions made on which patients should be selected for screening.”
Duncan Selbie, the head of PHE, yesterday issued a message offering a “heartfelt and unreserved” apology.
Last night, Joyce Robins, from Patient Concern, questioned why it had taken so long for the chief executive to speak up. “This is too little, too late,” she said.
An independent inquiry is to examine how it was that PHE failed to detect the problems – even as screening rates fell to the lowest rates in a decade.
A PHE spokesman declined to comment on the suggestion it had ignored the warnings in March last year.
Handlers for contractors Serco, taking in calls for an advice hotline, reportedly had only one hour’s training and were relying on a cheat sheet of symptoms after learning the news on the day Jeremy Hunt revealed the issue in the Commons, according to The Guardian.