ETP success?
It might surprise you to know that the Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions system is about as popular as Margaret Thatcher at a TUC meeting. As someone who works in pharmacy IT I happened to ask a local surgery when they would be up and running with it. 'Never, if we have any choice' was the swift reply. I see they've done a typically good job of getting the doctors on side then...
The other good thing to note is that 'the spine' (what the NHS is cleverly calling its server infrastructure) was inaccessible for a whole day recently so Electronic prescriptions simply didn't work. This is fine in phase 1 where paper and electrons run in tandem but when they roll out phase 2 and there is no such thing as a paper prescription what, prey tell, happens when the NHS finds itself spineless again? With the average surgery pumping out hundreds of prescriptions per day, the inability to access them, even for a few hours, could potentially lead to many thousands of people being without life-saving medication.
There's only one thing I'd less rather leave my life in the hands of than a computer and that's a team of NHS managers.