The UK Government has released over £100 million for public service reform in Northern Ireland.
The £102.6 million investment will go towards six Stormont projects across health, communities, finance, and agriculture. These include work to enable digital medical prescription transfers, as well as programmes to modernise record keeping and improve data sharing across the civil service.
The package comprises the final allocation of the £235 million in funding promised to Northern Ireland by the UK Government in 2024. This was part of a wider £3.3 billion settlement offered in a deal to restore devolved government in the region.
The largest single allocation from this package will go towards the ePharmacy Primary Care Digital Reform Programme, which is to see paper prescriptions replaced by a fully digital system, alongside the creation of a new digital platform for community pharmacy clinical services.
The Northern Irish Department of Health states that this will improve safety and efficiency for patients, alongside helping to free up time for GPs.
Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill said: “The £102.6 million Transformation Fund investment...will drive greater efficiency across government while helping deliver better services, strengthening healthcare, supporting children and families, supporting our farmers and laying the foundations for wider system reform.
“The ePharmacy Programme is right at the heart of this investment.
“It will modernise prescriptions, making them quicker, safer and more efficient through a new digital system across GP practices and pharmacies.”
The other programmes receiving funding are the “Digital Workplace” programme, which will modernise recordkeeping across the civil service to reduce duplication and manual handling, and the NISRA Data Linkage programme, which will connect datasets across departments to support evidence-based policymaking, as well as the better targeting of public services.
A portion of funding will also be dedicated to a “Together for Families” project, which will provide early intervention for vulnerable children and families; a “Pathway to Work and Wellbeing” proposal which will help people with health conditions find and sustain employment; and a Bovine Tuberculosis Research Project.
Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, said that the investment would help transform service delivery “for the long term”.
He added: “This £102.6 million investment is a significant milestone for Northern Ireland, and a clear signal of this Government’s commitment to supporting the Executive to deliver better public services for the people of Northern Ireland.
“At the heart of this funding is a simple goal: making public services work better for the people who rely on them every day.”