Marketing campaign can't mask difficult times for the national programme for IT.

This article reports that Connecting for Health, an agency of the British Department of Health, last week launched an England-wide marketing campaign to spread the word about some of the key benefits of the National Programme for information technology (NPfIT). DVDs, videos, 1.3 million booklets and A3-sized posters will market the benefits to health service staff of the National Health Service (NHS)'s Care Records Service, a scheme to give 50 million patients an electronic health record that can be accessed by any authorised NHS employee across the country. A study released earlier this month by the British Computer Society's Health Informatics Forum, shows that support remains strong for the aims of the NPfIT. It also indicates that NHS IT specialists and IT-literate clinicians still have a generally favourable view of the NPfIT. The draft consultation paper issued by the British Computer Society's Health Informatics Forum, on which comments are invited from anyone before the final position paper is prepared, was written in part to provide constructive criticism on the NPfIT. INSET: NHS National Programme for IT - the pain and the gain.