The Government has announced plans to scale back the nationwide NHS IT programme in a bid to save £700m. Health minister Simon Burns said a national IT system was not necessary or appropriate and that the Department of Health (DoH) will allow hospitals to either develop the systems they already have or buy new software themselves. ‘Now the NHS is changing, we need to change the way IT supports those changes, bringing decisions closer to the frontline and ensuring that change is manageable and holds less risk for NHS organisations,' said the DoH's director general for informatics, Christine Connelly. Some parts of the national system, including the Electronic Prescription Service, are already in place. ‘One of the dirty secrets of the NHS is the regrettable state of medical record keeping,' said Professor Iain Carpenter, from the Royal College of Physicians. ‘If IT in the health service is going to regain the confidence of the medical profession then more emphasis has to be placed by the Department of Health on making sure the new systems accurately capture the dialogue between doctor and patient.'