Alder Hey plans new hospital's IT

Liverpool's children's hospital is including extensive ICT work within a £175m tender for its new Children's Health Park project

The foundation trust has tendered for "the design, construction (to include the provision of an information management and technology infrastructure) and maintenance of a new 'world class' inpatient and acute treatment children's hospital," to be located next to the current one.

It expects to use the private finance initiative (PFI) to establish a deal costing around £175m over 30 years. The trust said the proportion spent on ICT would depend on the plans of the winning bidder.

The new hospital, which will have around 43,000 square metres of floor space, will include emergency care, paediatric intensive care, inpatient and day case theatres and beds, oncology, radiology and pathology.

Outsourcing ICT as part of a long term building construction and operation project is common in education through England's Buildings Schools for the Future programme, and has been increasingly used in local government, but has so far been relatively unusual within the NHS.

"A Treasury report entitled PFI: Meeting the Investment Challenge claimed that IT in PFI 'may not be able to consistently offer value for money benefits' because of 'the attendant difficulty of ensuring an appropriate sharing of risk'," said Kable's senior health analyst Victor Almeida.

"It remains to be seen whether Liverpool will prove the Treasury wrong and become a successful IT PFI initiative. In my view, this will be very difficult. IT expenditure is very volatile and products and services have a short lifecycle, compared to buildings. I don't remember seeing many (if any) 30 year ICT contracts in government. Technology suppliers are not used to providing such long term, shared risk proposition."

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