Papers prepared for the Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group’s (WCCG) board show that the much delayed NHS 111 service has cost £590,000 in extra support to the contract holders Harmoni.
The free-to-use telephone service for non-999 health enquiries was supposed to go live across the county on 1 April 2013. The CCG had to put in extra resources to get it up to acceptable performance standards.
It finally went fully live on 28 October 2013. Wiltshire’s NHS 111 service was not the only contract to have problems.
Both the design of the service and of the contracts was imposed by the Department of Health as part of the coalition government’s desire to have a telephone service that was cheaper to run than NHS Direct.
WCCG say they will be able to reclaim more than half the extra money from other CCG’s which are part of the Harmoni contract. The final overspend for WCCG this financial year is expected to be £200,000.
