The National Programme for IT is still plagued by problems and is unlikely to meet even the revised completion date of 2014, a committee of MPs has found.

On Tuesday, the Commons public accounts committee published its report on progress on the controversial IT project, which is being delivered by an agency, NHS Connecting for Health.

At the core of the project is the care records service, a plan to link patients’ records at GPs’ surgeries and hospitals across England’s 152 primary care trusts, but the committee found that delivery was still “way off the pace”.

The committee said the termination of the delivery contract for the south of England with Fujitsu in May 2008 cast severe doubts over the ability of IT service providers to meet their obligations. Of the four local service providers originally responsible for implementing care records, only two – BT and CSC – are still under contract.

Of the 380 acute trusts in the England, care records systems had been successfully deployed in only 133 cases.

Committee chair Edward Leigh said that if the situation did not improve in the next six months, the Department of Health should consider allowing trusts to apply for funding for alternative IT systems.

“The risks to the successful delivery of the National Programme for IT are as serious as ever,” Leigh said.

“Essential systems are late or, when deployed, do not meet expectations of clinical staff; estimates of local costs are still very unreliable; and, despite action to secure their commitment, many NHS staff remain unenthusiastic.”

Leigh’s committee colleague, Conservative MP Richard Bacon, said that implementation of the care records system was now “so far behind schedule [that] hospitals are walking away”.