back to article MPs: This paperless health service plan isn't worth the paper it isn't written on

MPs doubt that the Health Secretary's plans to make the NHS paperless by 2018 will be on time and budget, based on Whitehall's shambolic handling of the abandoned electronic health care record system. The widely derided National Programme for IT (NPfIT) was first signed off by ministers in 2002 under the previous Labour …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NHS is unable to do anything right ...

    Anyone been to the new QE hospital in Birmingham. Billions spent - at one point it was the largest civil engineering project in Europe. Less than 3 years old ...

    1) No step-free access from the car park* to the hospital. Wheelchair users (of which there are a lot, considering ITS A FUCKING HOSPITAL) have to use lifts.

    2) In most wards you can't completely pull the curtains round, as the rooms seems to be 4cm too small. The tracks have to be bent around one another

    3) Most corridors where the consultants work are too narrow to get a wheelchair past the chairs in the corridor if anyone is sitting in them

    4) Several sets of symmetrical doors which a wheelchair user needs to open *both* simultaneously (if only someone had an idea of *a*symmetric doors with the wider half being big enough for a wheelchair.

    5) Most checkin desks are full height. Anyone using a wheelchair is unable to be seen, or have space to write

    Hardly little niggles. And that's what I have seen in 3 visits. God forbid I got a chance to go backstage !

    *The car park layout is the pinnacle of fuckwittery. For reasons known only unto God, they appear to have permanently closed the exit to one side, forcing all traffic to exit through an exit the other side where the approach to the exit cuts the main route to circle the car park. The result at peak times is traffic simply can't move.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Big Business is unable to do anything right ...

      Everything you wrote re the QE is right, and more, It's the ultimate in brochure-based design, as far as I can tell.

      Mind you the NHS didn't design or build it and whichever NHS person signed off the design was probably told just to sign it and shut up. Many of the snags were known in advance.

      " it cost £627 million to build, taxpayers will foot a total bill of £2.581 billion – four times the actual cost of the hospital.

      Gareth Duggan, University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation Trust spokesman, said: “The full unitary payment for the new hospital announced by the Trust in 2006 was £40.8 million.

      “The cost in 2011/12, when the new hospital is completed, is projected to be £48.2 million. The difference is due to the application of inflation.”

      Private firms nationwide are expected to earn £60 billion from NHS hospital PFI schemes over the next three decades, the Conservatives have said."

      http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/annual-repayments-of-birminghams-superhospital-rise-122372

  2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Hunt "My dept f**ked up their massive IT system, But they won't f**k up the next one."

    No I made that quote up but seriously that is effectively what he's pitching, isn't it?

    Here's a notion, radical as it may sound.

    Let's not have yet another reorganization/massive IT project/nationwide circle jerk for at least a decade

    Let's find out why UK hospital death rates are the worst in the G7 and why that data is so sensitive that only the US is named on the list (perhaps because they have the best and are happy to be at #1) and find out how the UK system can not be the worst, especially for things like pneumonia for elderly patients for example.

    I know, absurdly radical, not doing anything. ???

    BTW NfIT supports keep mentioning the digital imaging system. It's meant to be a success story as it does allow "filmless" (to coin a term) viewing of various sensors, XRay, MI, Ultrasound, PET etc.

    Note For these applications do you really want a "lossy" compression algorith that throws away high frequency (IE lone or small pixel cluster) data as "irrelevant" ?

    That could be your only shot of a treatable condition before it grows too big to be operable or just tries to kill you.

    That said I can believe that suppliers do make it balls achingly difficult to get an image out of their system, despite ever fairly simple algorithms giving 50% compression (BTW an X-ray image is roughly 2048x2048 at 12 bits, about 6MB uncompressed. Multiply by a 1000 beds and 1 year and the numbers do start to stack up).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hunt "My dept f**ked up their massive IT system, But they won't f**k up the next one."

      The UK Gov will always fuck up IT projects when they go with closed source solutions,

      really the UK gov needs to mandate Open Source where possible, at least then systems wont become obsolete easily...

      it is not that hard or expensive to hire a few geeks to maintain a code base, as long as you have the code!

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Re: really the UK gov needs to mandate Open Source where possible

        I'm quite sure it is just as possible to royally fuck up an Open Source solution as it is to bugger a Closed Source one.

        Open Source is not the issue, the issue is in proper specifications, proper oversight and proper responsability. Apperently, there was none of that in this project - or any other for that matter.

        Open Source is not a magic wand that solves all IT woes.

        1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
          Meh

          Re: really the UK gov needs to mandate Open Source where possible

          "Open Source is not a magic wand that solves all IT woes."

          True.

          But it would make turfing out the incumbents if their product proved to be rubbish a lot easier.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hunt "My dept f**ked up their massive IT system, But they won't f**k up the next one."

      Just go to East Surrey Hospital. It is filthy, badly designed and a good few people I know won't go anywhere near it.

      I was involved in an RTA last year near Dorking. I had the option of East Surrey, Epsom or Guildford hospitals. I chose Guildford.

      I've seen enough of the inside of hospitals over the past few years because I have Leukaemia.

      Some places are really well run. Others need wiping off the face of the planet. This is all down to the local management and not the NHS dictats coming down from central government.

  3. TheDysk
    Facepalm

    £10 Billion...

    And of course the NHS will have to make more cuts in services to save the £10 Billion that has been wasted by successive governments.

    One Word: F**kwits

  4. fLaMePrOoF
    Happy

    This has to be the most eloquent sub heading of late :)

  5. personincloudnow

    Well, I think we all knew it was heading that way years ago. The nail in the coffin was Richard Granger's hardline approach to NHS contracts with stiff penalties.

    It is also ridiculous to think that it was possible to integrate all of the disparate clinical systems for which the government allowed the NHS to 'go their own way' and procure their own systems in the name of decentralisation, empowerment and choice/competition. It's a disgrace that a national service of such importance has never had mandated software solutions that are used nationally and that are interoperable with each other from day 1. It is the government and the NHS that have failed, not IT.

    The ridiculousness continued with the way the implementation was allowed to be derailed by politics and the top medical consultants (General Medical Council?) who refused to back any sort of integrated national IT system because it threatened their fiefdoms.

    It failed because the government insisted on allowing the NHS trusts and clinics to do their own thing when they were clearly incapable and giving the job of trying to impose a national IT system to the NPFIT who themselves were also clearly incapable of running a project of such scale to any sort of good practice, efficiency and constraint.

    The broadband project (BDUK) is going the same way. Councils have spent months/years and millions in just the tender process and signing a contract mostly with BT because their stipulation in the contract for companies that have a history of providing national network infrastructure really excluded everyone but 2 or 3 companies from bidding. Why we didn't just give the money to BT is beyond me. We would have more money to extend the reach to more homes and also be ahead of the curve. Instead, the budget is soaring and already it is now being estimated as finished in 2017 rather than 2015. Yet another failed public sector led programme.

    Yet the blame for it all always rests with the 'overpaid' consultants and contractors as they are very convenient scapegoats. After all, surely the poor "low paid" public sector workers could never be blamed for any of it.

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