puffbox

Capita to take over NHS Choices

I see today that Capita has been named as the preferred bidder for the £60m+ contract to run the NHS Choices website for the next 3 years - ahead of the incumbent, the Dr Foster Intelligence public-private partnership, as well as IBM, Serco and TATA.

According to Capita's own press release:

Capita will be responsible for the hosting, technical and content development of the NHS online presence and related digital services. A key focus will be on ensuring innovative engagement with citizens and clinicians to support a healthier nation.

As many as 70 companies expressed an interest when the procurement exercise kicked off late last year. The current contract is due to expire next month.

It's clearly a big deal, and although I've done quite a bit of work lately for the Department of Health and NHS, I don't know what the implications of a change would be. Anyone care to enlighten us all?

• Andrew Cooper at 1:16 am on 17 July 2008

  Sorry, I'm a bit confused. Did you just say '£60 million plus contract to run a website' or did I misread you? Please tell me it isn't true.

  http://mindworksblog.com/2008/07/09/only-connect/

• OK, enough is enough « Mindworks’ Weblog at 1:33 am on 17 July 2008

  [...] enough is enough Posted July 17, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | How do we stop this insanity?  Hopefully our dear leader will make one of his famous early morning calls to whoever it was that [...]

• Simon at 9:35 am on 17 July 2008

  No getting away from it... £60m is a lot of money. I don't really need to say that, do I.

  Some context, courtesy of TheyWorkForYou. NHS Choices annual budget this year: £38 million. Total unique visitors: pushing past the 1 million per month mark. That's 40% of the equivalent figure for NHS Direct.

• Simon at 5:48 pm on 17 July 2008

  I've been in touch with a few people connected to NHS Choices today, none of whom wanted to go on the record.

  I'm told the official line is: the show goes on as normal. The day-to-day stuff still needs doing, and the development roadmap goes well into next year. But with staff receiving formal TUPE notification today, it's inevitable that minds should wander a bit.

• Becky at 2:55 pm on 18 July 2008

  Wow , I met with some people from Dr Foster a few weeks ago and they were pretty certain they would continue so this must be a bit of a shock.

• James at 9:06 pm on 21 July 2008

  Yes, you could probably build quite a nice website for £80m. But should you? (Or rather, should they?).

  The Power of Information blog (run by the Cabinet Office) helpfully noted a new paper from the US suggesting that governments should build public data services before they build websites (which get old very fast).

  More here:
  http://www.patientopinion.org.uk/blog/post/2008/07/Should-the-government-build-web-sites.aspx

• Simon at 9:05 am on 22 July 2008

  Indeed James, it's a conclusion I've reluctantly reached myself in the last couple of years. Unless, that is, government gets markedly better at building sites - and I wouldn't entirely rule that out.

  But I fear it'll shift the cultural question from one part of the organisation (the IT dept) to another. Statisticians don't like the idea of other people doing nasty things - or in my experience, anything - with their datasets.

• Ossie Jesson at 1:45 pm on 22 July 2008

  I went to the wordcampuk at Birmingham this weekend
  I am new to blogging and web communites (HI everyone }
  I was nearly the oldest there , but not quite
  I am not a very clever chappie but i would guesstimate that some of the quys and girls that attended the weekend could undercut that £60 million by just smmidgillion or two
  Someone please let the smart people have a go now
  don,t let them keep doing yesterday all over again

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