Read the article below and answer ALL the questions that follow. Reinventing the wheel $$ a private internet for medical records wastes $10$ billon In a nutshell the United Kingdom$$s National Programme for Information Technology $($NPfIT$)$ was conceived as a central database of every United Kingdom resident$$s medical records in a secure system available to all suitably authorised medical professionals. Like many projects this started life as an idea that seems great at the time. This was an idea from the then new Blair Labour government. They did of course consult assorted management consultants all of whom rubbed their hands in glee at the vast fees on offer for a vast programme such as this. A key benefit of this system was based on access to your health care records. If you were away on holiday, perhaps skiing in Scotland or surfing in Cornwall, and became ill or injured, the local medical people would have access to your medical records. When the programme started, I happened to chair the Programme Management Special Interest Group within the Association for Project Management. As programme managers we were especially interested in benefits so$,$ yes, we could see the lifesaving potential of this new idea. To understand the benefit better we asked the National Health Service $($NHS$)$ how big a problem lack of medical records at the point of delivery currently was. We expected to hear that a certain number of people was treated inappropriately, or their treatment was delayed due to this lack of data access. After some while we did get a response. $$We have no idea,$$ came the answer, $$we do not store this data.$$ So$,$ we were off to a bad start committing something in the order of fifteen billion pounds to resolve a problem of unknown size. It might have been a problem for one person each year. It is important and rather shocking to know that the $$b$$ word is accurate. The sum involved was $15$bn $$ the then cost of four or five sparkling new hospitals. The then Parliamentary Under$-$Secretary of State for Health, Lord Hunt, announced the proposed major Information Technology reform to the NHS on $12$ June $2002,$ along with the publication of the Department of Health$$s $$Delivering $21$st Century IT support for the NHS $$ National Strategic Programme$($the NSP Plan$).$ The NSP Plan initiated what would subsequently become known as NPfIT, with its vision of $$connect$[$ing$]$ delivery of the NHS Plan with the capabilities of modern information technologies$($DH$,2002,$ p$\mathrm{.}1),$ through delivering the four key elements discussed at the $18$ February $2002$ seminar: $1.$ an integrated electronic health records system; $2.$ electronic prescriptions; $3.$ an electronic appointment booking system; $4.$ an underpinning IT infrastructure with sufficient capacity to support the national applications and local systems. Gung$-$ho as only a public sector programme can be$,$ work began on element four $$ the private internet infrastructure. It was decided that the internet was not sufficiently secure for our medical records, so BT was awarded a half a billion quid to create a private, NHS$-$only, internet to be known as the Spine. A large chunk of this cash went on fibre optic cables laid beside railways lines from city center to city center and technological infrastructure to support it$.$ Very considerable expert stakeholder comment arose at this time saying that this private NHS internet would be at best no better, and probably worse than the already existing internet. Government spokeswoman Caroline Flint failed to dispel concerns regarding access to patients' data by persons not involved in their care when she commented in March $2007$ that $"$in general only those staff who are working as part of a team that is providing a patient with care, that is$,$ those having a legitimate relationship with the patient, will be able to see a patient's health record.$$ In June $2006,$ the Local Medical Committees$$ Conference passed a proposal to advise GPs to consider withdrawing from the Spine on privacy and security grounds $($E$-$Health Insider, $2006).$ Several data risks with NPfIT around patient awareness, confidentiality, accuracy and security were also acknowledged by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas $($Thomas$,2007).$ A little while later serious stakeholder issues began to emerge chief of which was that common stakeholder cry; $$Why were we not consulted earlier? The next group of Stakeholders to raise concerns were the many UK GPs themselves. GPs asked two key questions: If the electronic appointments system, to be known as $$choose and book$$ was to allow a patient to choose which consultant to see, in which hospital and when, how would this fit with the minute appointment time GPs were supposed to allocate to each patient. How would all the m

QUESTION $1(20$ marks$)$

Examine the importance of project stakeholder and communications management and indicate how this could have assisted the project in creating a private internet for medical records