The NAO's overall conclusions are that:

• the Department of Health is taking action to progress all the recommendations which it accepted from the Committee of Public Accounts report.
• all elements of the Programme are advancing and some are complete, though delivering a nationally-specified Programme into the highly-devolved NHS continues to be an enormous challenge. For the NHS Care Records Service, the original timescales proved to be unachievable, raised unrealistic expectations and put confidence in the Programme at risk. While the Programme costs have largely held, the timetable for the NHS Care Records Service has slipped.
• the original vision for the Programme nevertheless remains intact and still appears feasible. The major outstanding challenge is to finish developing and deploying the care records systems that will help NHS Trusts to achieve the Programme's intended benefits of improved services and better patient care.

The Department of Health has agreed the text of the NAO's report and work is already underway to ensure that NHS Connecting for Health and the NHS maintain the impetus to meet the challenges involved in the remaining stages of the Programme.

Please visit the second NAO report into the National Programme for IT (PDF 208Kb) for full details, plus report volume 1 (PDF 814Kb) and report volume 2 (PDF 494Kb).