Expensive IT fiasco

PUBLIC sector IT projects have become a byword for waste on a terrifying scale.

Police Scotland has just walked away from a ‘too ambitious’ £60million scheme bedevilled with problems. Now we report today that an NHS 24 ‘supercomputer’ to deal with out-of-hours patients is £55million over-budget and four years behind schedule.

NHS 24 insisted the hotline system would be in action this summer after a failed switch-on saw call handlers forced to use pen and paper to record symptoms reported by patients.

Now Audit Scotland says the system will not be ready until December 2017. And having lost half a million for every month it is offline, the cost has leapt 73 per cent to a terrifying £131.2million.

Waste of this magnitude is unacceptable at any time – but simply cannot be countenanced in these straitened days.

Worse, NHS 24 deals with unwell people and it is no exaggeration to say that lives are at risk.

The Nationalists boastfully call themselves ‘the guardians of the NHS’. If there were a grain of truth in that, this burgeoning crisis would be top of Nicola Sturgeon’s in-tray.

Platitudes from Health Secretary Shona Robison about taking Audit Scotland ‘seriously’ would be laughable if the situation were not so dire.