NHSNet in crisis over technical support

The British Medical Association (BMA) is threatening to file a complaint with Oftel over the level of support offered by the BT and Cable & Wireless for NHSNet.

Grant Kelly, who represents GPs (doctors with practising surgeries) at the BMA, says NHSNet lacks service level agreements and locks GPs into contracts of one year and then three years. He blames BT and Cable & Wireless, as they provide the telecoms infrastructure for the network.

"At the moment I can use Dixons and Freeserve to access the same information as NHSNet. But if the NHS starts putting exclusive patient information on NHSNet then we would have to consider referring them to Oftel to see if this constituted a monopoly."

Kelly added: "The NHS would never get away with this if it was a business service."

Alan Pyne, director of Schema, agreed. "That certainly sounds like very poor business practice," he told Silicon.com. "But it's not a monopoly, because it's the fault of whoever negotiated the deal. The issue here is really the conflict between GPs and the NHS Executive."

A Department of Health spokesman confirmed that the NHS is planning to put exclusive information on NHSNet at the end of the year, as soon as enough GPs signed up to the service.

He also confirmed that there were no service level agreements on NHSNet at present. However, a BT spokesman has stressed that their introduction is "imminent".