A report commissioned by the Health Service Executive has warned that the €160 million PPARS debacle could happen again because management weaknesses still have not been resolved, writes Liam Reid, Political Reporter
The report states: "Could PPARS happen again? It could and probably already has."
The PPARS project was intended to provide a new payroll and human resource management system for the 130,000 staff in the health service. But it ran into major problems, and covers less than one-third of staff. Its roll-out was suspended last October amid a public outcry over its cost, which included the payment of €60 million to outside consultants.
On Wednesday the board of the HSE deferred a decision on the future of PPARS amid uncertainty within the organisation on whether to proceed with the project.
The confidential report on "modernising health service organisations" was commissioned by the HSE from Dr Joe McDonagh, a computer technology and management expert in Trinity College Dublin, in order to learn lessons from the PPARS saga. It was delivered to HSE management last month.
The report says many features of the current health reform programme "appear identical to the features of PPARS".
These include a fundamental "leadership deficit" in overseeing major reform, and a failure to use and consult with in-house staff who already have an indepth knowledge of the current organisation, including its weaknesses.
Dr McDonagh says such an approach to major reform "is flirting with the prospect of failure".
The HSE, he says, "has inherited key weaknesses that were embedded" in the old health board system, including the belief by senior management that computer systems are "a necessary evil" rather than a key tool for a modern organisation.
The report states that the health system had "neither the capability nor capacity to deliver change of the nature envisaged by PPARS".
Dr McDonagh says that "key players within the health system knew for a long time that PPARS was in trouble".
His report stresses that in making decisions for the future, health service management must adopt an objective and independent approach. He says that the "central players" deciding on the future of PPARS "are anything but objective or independent" and some "are not even aware there is a problem with their current course of action".
He suggests that outside expertise is necessary to help reach a decision on the future of PPARS.
The report warns that the reforms proposed by both the Minister for Finance and the Comptroller and Auditor General on project management to prevent PPARS-like problems from recurring are unlikely to succeed because they fail to address the fundamental problem that caused the PPARs fiasco. "No amount of project management will fix ... leadership deficit," it states.