A: An African Elephant can produce a baby in just under 2 years. That’s much quicker than it’s taking for Northern Ireland’s European Centre for Connected Health (ECCH) to complete the gestation of its baby, the Northern Ireland Remote Monitoring Service, the commissioning of which is now well into its third year.(See TA items.)
Not only that, but we understand that the group led by Hewlett Packard, one of the four contenders that were eventually short listed, has withdrawn from the process and so too has one of the five Health & Social Care Trusts – ‘customers’ for the service. The latter is just as well because the delay probably means that the scheme has lost a considerable amount of its initial funding and will be scaled back from its original intention to provide a service to more than 5,000 people.
Not that you will find any of that on ECCH’s website… In the meantime, people who could be benefiting from the service are not; the other suppliers must be furious at the time and money they have wasted, and ECCH continues to spend taxpayers’ money on itself, turning a fiasco into a scandal.
What’s the rush?
I can imagine the logic from their side is let’s not rush this as the sooner we have the procurement complete the sooner some (note, not all) of us will be out of a job.
The last Nu-Labour government had what can almost be described as a fetish for these super-procurement projects with appalling track records for success. Killing all local level procurement (A la NPfIT/CFH for instance, one among many). The problem is though that I don’t see Blu-Labour being any different.