Mike O’Brien new minister for NHS IT

Tags: Burnham Cerner Darzi DH Labour Lorenzo Millennium

09 Jun 2009

Mike O’Brien, the MP for North Warwickshire, has become the latest minister to take responsibility for NHS Connecting for Health and NHS IT.

O’Brien, a former solicitor general, was minister for pension reform at the Department of Work and Pensions before Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reshuffle this weekend. He replaces Ben Bradshaw, who left the Department of Health to become culture secretary.

O’Brien arrives at the DH at a difficult time for NHS Connecting for Health and NHS IT. The agency is struggling to deliver the Lorenzo and Cerner Millennium patient record systems to the health service and is seeing some of its other programmes curtailed by the worsening financial climate.

However, he will not be able to give his full attention to the subject. As minister of state for health services, he is also taking charge of a number of other big and difficult NHS issues, such as finance, performance management and efficiency, as well as major planks of the Darzi reform programme.

Bradshaw took charge of the same portfolio in July 2007, replacing Lord Hunt of King’s Heath after his second spell in charge of NHS IT. Lord Hunt, who resigned over the Iraq war but later returned to government, is now a minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and deputy leader of the House of Lords.

O’Brien, meanwhile, is one of three new faces at the DH. Andy Burnham was announced as health secretary last week, while Gillian Merron has joined the junior ministerial team as minister of state for public health.

On his website, O’Brien makes much of his working class background, noting that his father “worked on the railway” and his mother was a school dinner lady. He says he went into Labour politics when “the Conservatives put up the rent on our council house and my parents worried about it.”

He trained as a lawyer and taught law before entering Parliament in 1992, where he made his name working on police and anti-social behaviour issues. More recently, he has been a Foreign Office minister, energy minister, solicitor general, and pensions minister.

Lyn Whitfield

Reader's Comments

Understanding finances will be an asset

16 Jun 09 23:06

I've never understood how CfH represented good value.

We had recently undertaken some GP system migrations for around £6K. Now I'm told that, with the same supplier via an LSP, these have become £11K under GPSoC. and that is just the local cost (we don't see what additional costs CfH bear).

This seems to tie with my previous experience of charges of using LSPs, a near doubling of the cost against the previous equivalents, for lots of extra paperwork and complexity, but dubious extra value.

This should be no suprise, perhaps a minister responsible for Finance as well as CfH will finally link 2+2 ?