VARs hope NHS reforms will boost channel coffers

Purse strings set to loosen following sweeping changes to health service

NHS resellers are hopeful that newly enforced reforms to the health service could kick-start spending in the sector.

From the start of this month, sweeping changes to the health service will see the abolition of all 151 Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in favour of newly formed Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and Commissioning Support Units (CSUs).

Analyst TechMarketView claims that the changes could see the NHS purse strings loosen after a period of reluctance to spend in the run-up to the transition period.

The restructure will see GPs' IT managed by the CCGs, which will receive support from CSU groups which aim to provide IT analysis and support for the subsidiaries, the market watcher said.

TechMarketView research director Tola Sargeant said that once the dust has settled from the reforms, IT spending in the health service is expected to rise.

"To date, the most obvious impact has been in primary care IT, where the looming abolition of PCTs and creation of CCGs and CSUs has slowed decision making and put procurements on hold," she added.

"Going forwards, it seems CSUs will be important customers for SITS [software IT suppliers] in primary care. Now the new organisations are formally in place, we expect the purse strings to loosen further, although there is still much uncertainty in the market."

Reseller Trustmarque's NHS client director Ben Jones said he expects to sign up a wave of new customers after the initial changes have settled down.

"During the build-up, it has been a mixed bag," he said. "Some PCTs have not [been] willing to have contracts on terms with some vendors which extends beyond their expiry, but others have taken on three, four or five-year terms – it is not uniform across the board.

"Some [authorities] have said they want to procure a solution but cannot raise an order for a few weeks while they sort things out, but we expect this sort of thing to bed down swiftly."

Softcat's public sector director Jamie Burke claimed that despite the big changes in the health service, business has remained strong.

He said: "It goes without saying that change and uncertainty can affect spend, but we should not forget that the main driver behind the formation of CCGs is to improve commissioning... and IT has a pivotal role to play as part of this transformation process.

"Softcat has not experienced any impact on the amount of new projects our healthcare team are engaged with; in fact it is quite the opposite."