In the Executive Summary of its November 2006 survey, Medix said: The findings confirm earlier Medix findings that a majority of doctors believes that NPfIT has the potential to benefit clinical care. However, they also confirm that doctors are increasingly critical of the project—especially of its costs and of how it is being implemented. But knowledge of NPfIT is unchanged: few doctors have a lot of information about it and a large majority continues to say that they have had inadequate consultation about it.

  It is not easy to compare the Medix surveys with those conducted by Ipsos MORI for NHS Connecting for Health as few questions used are precisely the same. Also the methodologies are different and the Medix sample sizes are much larger. Nonetheless, the following indicates that the Ipsos MORI results fit an overall pattern established by Medix—reflected by the above extract from the Medix Executive Summary.

		Medix Feb 2003	Medix June 2003	Medix Feb 2004	Medix July 2004	Medix Jan 2005	MORI July 2005	Medix Jan 2006	MORI Feb 2006	Medix Nov 2006	Comment
Likely effect on clinical care? term)	Improvement	60%	60%	63%	53%	54%	65%	63%	68%	69%	These are encouraging findings, especially as the trend is clearly upwards.
Is NPfIT a good use of NHS resources?	Yes No		47% 27%	43% 28%	31% 30%	- -	25% 46%	17% 57%	20% 50%	11% 68%	In contrast, this indicates a marked reversal of view since NPfIT's inception.
How much information have you had?	Little/none**	94%	94%	77%	71%	64%	66%	56%	68%	50%	It is remarkable that so many doctors still know little about such an important project. (And see Note 2)

Notes:

  1.  -  Question not asked in this survey.

  2.  **  An Ipsos MORI finding in February was that 11% of doctors said they had "no information at all" about NPfIT—illogically, elsewhere in the survey, 25% said they had "never heard of it". If accurate, that is extraordinary over four years from the programme's inception.