CSC sheds more staff

Another 750 CSC staff in the UK will lose their jobs in the company’s “adjustment” to its workforce, employees were told in an email last week.

The company, which announced that it had returned to profitability in its latest trading statement in May, has been shedding staff from a number of its divisions.

When asked to confirm the redundancies, a spokeswoman from CSC told EHI: “These adjustments to our workforce are part of an enterprise-wide activity and are not directly related to any specific clients or programmes in the UK.”

Despite this, EHI has been told that staff working on the Lorenzo electronic patient record are affected.

Lorenzo is the system that CSC was due to deploy to the North, Midlands and East of England under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The system has been dogged by development and deployment delays, leading to long negotiations with the Department of Health over a new deal for the NME. The company finally reached an agreement with the DH in September last year.

The agreement means CSC no longer has an exclusive right to supply IT to trusts in the NME, but trusts that still want Lorenzo can access central funding for deployment and service costs.

A CSC employee told EHI that some of the staff due to lose their jobs are working on NHS accounts, and that at least 42 of these are working on the Lorenzo deployments.

CSC has secured eight trusts that want to take the EPR under the new agreement, but questions are being asked about how the company will further develop and deploy it, if it is shedding jobs from the relevant teams.

This is not the first bout of redundancies the company has made. EHI reported in February last year that the CSC was going to make up to 500 people working on NHS accounts redundant.

Several CSC bosses have departed in the last year, including the company’s former health executive, Guy Hains, and its former sales director, Graham Frost.

In the Common’s Public Accounts Committee last week, chair Margaret Hodge referred to CSC as a “rotten company” with a “rotten product” after quizzing DH officials about its LSP deals.

The committee learned that CSC has so far been paid £1 billion for its NME work, and that it will get another £1 billion, around half of that for Lorenzo.