With another NHS overhaul in the offing, £200m up for grabs in northern England for pretty much anything related to IT

North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative (NOE CPC), a buyers' group of NHS trusts, has dished out a juicy tender for an IT services and consultancy framework agreement worth up to £200m. Led by Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, the framework is aimed at professional services and consultancy support …

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have all the consultants we need

The only consultants we need you can think of as a kind of doctor.

We have ENT consultants (no not walking trees) who deal with ears, noses ant throats.

We have consultant surgeons. They are called Mr, Mrs, Miss and so on because we were taught to be very polite to people with knives!

We have all sorts of other consultants. They will do things like save your life, help you get better or even stop you getting sick in the first place.

The consultants described in this article are not the same thing and need a different name - whether we really "need" them or not.

[Robert Grant]

Re: We already have all the consultants we need

This is silly. Consultant is just an employee of a company that another company contracts to do work. It's an employment relationship, not a job title.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We already have all the consultants we need

not a job title

And in healthcare, the employment relationship is that they are people who know a c**pload of stuff about medicine.

[Shez]

Re: We already have all the consultants we need

Do ants have throats?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: We already have all the consultants we need

Have consulted with oner find out? Or were the fees to much for you?

[NeilPost]

Internal Shared Services

For the love of God, why they fuck don’t they create an internal Shared Services Team to build knowledge and capability in-house.

After-all there will be plenty of unemployed with good IT/Project/Procurement skills out there after the CV19 jobs bloodbath is over.

What does the NHS Central IT have to say on this before you even take about the NHSx skunkworks??

Madness. More tax-money go the usual crowd of half deliverers and bottom feeders.

[EnviableOne]

Re: Internal Shared Services

there is no central IT, all NHS trusts are individual, and NHSX is App Hancock's quango that have no direction and no idea whats going on, in the front lines.

The National Program for IT or NPfIT was according to the Public Accounts Commitee "one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector"

The consultants are generally needed as you cant use COTS software and systems in the medical space and getting Radiology Information Systems to talk to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems, Electronic Health Records, Radiation monitoring equipment, electronic Proscribing, bed management and case tracking systems is not a walk in the park.

The NHS no longer exists, it is 8,765 (yes that many,) different organisations from 20,000 staff to just a handfull, spread out, completley disjointed, forced to compete against each other and private organisations for every penny of the NHS budget.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder...

... I work for exactly the kind of megacorp that takes the piss out of the NHS (and, indeed,has done previously) ... any poacher-turned-gamekeeper roles available?

[NeilPost]

Re: I wonder...

If you are remotely competent no, if you are a toadying lick-spittal yes.