Jeremy Hunt trolled NHS staff at a health conference yesterday by claiming that the millions of pounds slashed from a flagship NHS technology launched to help securely integrate digital record keeping, was not a cut in funding – he had merely “staged the rollout” of funds.

Hunt’s comments come after NHS England’s admission last month that NHS organisations who applied to the Integrated Digital Care Technology Fund would receive £43 million between them instead of the £240 million that was promised when the fund was announced. As a result of this “staged rollout”, most of the proposed NHS IT projects are effectively dead in the water. The suspicion is that Hunt has diverted the funds to frontline services because the tech proposals were rubbish…