Royal Berks spends £16m on consultants

Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has spent £16.6m on external consultants working on its Cerner Millennium implementation.

A Freedom of Information Act request made by BBC Berkshire asked how much the trust has spent on external consultants to help manage the electronic patient record project.

The response was a staggering £16.6m spent employing 213 external consultants since the inception of the programme.

More than 40 contractors continue to work on fixing the troubled implementation, compared to 10 trust staff who are employed to oversee the system.

Royal Berkshire has been facing significant operational and financial pressures since deploying Millennium in June last year.

Documents obtained by EHI under FOI showed it had spent £30m on the system up to October 2012. A report to the Council of Governors earlier this year revealed that it expected to spend another £6.2m implementing the system in 2013, compared to a budgeted £2.5m.

In February, the trust confirmed it was “in dispute” with Cerner over the costs of the system, which chief executive Ed Donald described as unsustainable.

He said at the time that the increased costs were due to significant data correction being required each month and an increased number of patient administration staff being needed to run the system.

A statement from the trust says the contractor fees cover the five-year development and implementation of the EPR.

“The implementation depended heavily on contractors with a high degree of specialist knowledge and recent experience of implementing what is a significant and vast change programme for any organisation,” it says.

“We continue to employ a number of interim staff who are essential in supporting us in this work to ensure that staff can continue to deliver high quality care to our patients when using the system, and the trust can depend upon the information provided by the system to monitor clinical standards and ensure it is paid for the work it undertakes.

The trust is also working with Cerner to make the best use of Millennium.

A Cerner spokesman said it is offering to support the trust, “because when successfully implemented, Millennium gives doctors and nurses real-time access to high-quality clinical information which is critical in the delivery of world-class care for patients.”