HSE orders report into computer fiasco

THE Health Service Executive (HSE) is to carry out an internal review of the €150 million PPARS fiasco and publish the findings within two months, the HSE chief promised yesterday.

Following a meeting of the HSE board yesterday, Professor Brendan Drumm said he intended to publish the report. “I can see no reason why we won’t be very frank with the public about what we actually find,” he said.

Professor Brendan Drumm declared himself happy with the decision to suspend continued implementation of PPARS, the Personnel, Payment and Related Systems and FISP, the financial management system.

As the chief accounting officer, he had to find out if the system was able to provide the kind of service that the organisation needed.

“I need time to make that decision and to be certain that as the chief accounting officer it is being done in the interests of the taxpayer,” he said.

It was, however, much too early to say if the system had a future in the organisation, he said.

“It does work in very many different environments. It is a huge, internationally-used system. What I have to determine is can it not only work but can it work effectively and cost-effectively for this organisation.”

Clearly, he said, the HSE wanted to find out if the money spent on PPARS was wisely spent.

“We are going to find out because the Comptroller and Auditor General is going to report on this to us all in the next two months,” he pointed out. We would all find out then if this was significant waste or just unforeseen expenditure, Prof Drumm said.

“We have run into the difficulty that we have merged from 11 health boards into a single HSE and that is one of the reasons that I now need to know whether the plans for this project are still applicable in the context of a single organisational approach,” he said.

The HSE said PPARS, developed since 1995 and costing €150m to date, would continue to operate in four health authority regions for the foreseeable future.

While the €170m FISP is still at planning stage and is within budget, the HSE said it was important that it was fully satisfied that all such systems were adequate. Around 30m has been spent on FISP to date.

The HSE rejected allegations that people who had concerns about PPARS were “bullied and vilified” by managers and pointed out that it had not received any reports or complaints of this nature from staff.

PPARS is a common national human resources and payroll processing system and is currently operating in St James’s Hospital in Dublin and three former health board areas.

In a letter to the HSE, the former chief executive of St James’s Hospital, John O’Brien, now one of Prof Drumm’s top advisors, described the system as a disaster.

Prof Drumm said Mr O’Brien’s letter referred to very significant day-to-day problems in the functioning of the system. He did not believe that anyone could have reached a point at this stage of saying the system does not work.