Cretins from Hell
That was the term for CfH round our neck of the NHS. There are more fingers in that pie than there is pie. At least there were at the time that I escaped the NHS in disgust at a body that could spend literally millions on a piss-poor web-application that was supposed to show our practice's target results to us for payments, but couldn't even add up the numbers correctly.
The problem isn't Microsoft. Sure, they're more expensive than if you put Open Office in place, but you could use pen and paper and it would still cost a fortune by the time it had been through the upper levels of the NHS. I had the misfortune of sitting in a procurement meeting for an IT support company for our PCT. They spent literally four times what it would cost to hire an entirely new and extra IT support person working in house, on an outside company that did nothing but take calls and then pass them back to our own IT support staff. During the roll out of "The Spine", we had a bod turn up at our practice who was a freelancer, hired by an agency, who was leased to a "freelancing company" who then leased him to ATOS to go round the practices and check if computers were up to spec for the new software. Four levels of profit skimming for a guy whose IT skills were barely capable of checking the processor and ram on a PC which was the extent of his job.
It's frustrating because there are so many people working so hard at the bottom of the NHS, and there are so many bastards at the highest levels skimming money out of it. I still have friends at the PCT level working like crazy to try and save the NHS from the likes of Blair and Cameron.
I could save the NHS literally hundreds of millions if I were just allowed to shoot selected people at the top. The NHS is worth saving, but the DOH needs a good purging.