What's so special about NHS?

[Liability]

Funny because I was speaking to some agencies just this week asking the same question "If they only recruit previous NHS people, how do you ever break into it? And how did they ever break into it?".. is there just a small group of NHS experts who get all the £1000/day contracts for advising on 'the way forward'?

This is true and has been for a while.

But if you take a look now - particularly over the past 12 months they have grown up and brought in totally external people. Hence the delay and re-neg on London LSP once Fujitsu got booted, and numerous other things.

[Board Game Geek]

Indeed, the NPfIT service is getting better by the day, and some of the folks I work with (NPfIT Manager for Service Delivery in our Local PCT) are clued up cookies who have come in from the private sector and are bringing their experience with them.

In the 3 years I have been working alongside the NPfIT Teams (and occasionally been seconded to them for technical assistance in my own specialist area), I've seen the service improve considerably.

It's not all doom and gloom you know !

[Purple Dalek]

The project’s completely fooked and the big consultancies are making so much money out of keeping the problems in place instead of solving them that bringing in people with new, fresh ideas would only derail the gravy train.

Moderators! This guy is pointing out the painfully obvious in General. I suggest a weekend ban.

[al_cam]

In my experience, PM'ing in the NHS is much harder than in the public sector - have to achieve the same results with less resources, much red tape and inefficiency, no strategy, plans etc etc.

If I were hiring a PM for an NHS project, I would seriously consider picking someone who could demonstrate they could deliver within the NHS - lesser PM's would either not deliver or just walk - for example, I am the second PM on my current NHS project - previous guy walked without delivering much, and at times it wouldn't have taken much for me to follow him...

That said, I would also be looking for a PM with real life experience as well otherwise you risk hiring someone with no concept of how things should be done.

Al.

[Liability]

Indeed, the NPfIT service is getting better by the day, and some of the folks I work with (NPfIT Manager for Service Delivery in our Local PCT) are clued up cookies who have come in from the private sector and are bringing their experience with them.

In the 3 years I have been working alongside the NPfIT Teams (and occasionally been seconded to them for technical assistance in my own specialist area), I've seen the service improve considerably.

It's not all doom and gloom you know !

Id estimate that by April of next year alot of the changes will start to filter down.

What is really sad is that it took them HOW MANY years to recognise that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys? There are still some old school people left at the top - but I would suspect they will be sidelined by mid to end of next year as its now about VALUE - although that is a joke in itself bearing in mind how much money was been wasted on this project to date.