Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair - George Burns
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Government scraps NHS IT programme
THE UK GOVERNMENT has finally bit the bullet and decided to scrap the massively wasteful and ultimately failed £12.7bn National Health Service (NHS) IT programme after years of cost overruns and delays.
According to the Guardian, the project to have one IT system across the whole of the NHS was dropped after Health secretary Andrew Lansley, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson decided it was better to discontinue the programme rather than put even more money into it.
It is likely that the Tories will use this opportunity to criticise the last Labour government for starting the project and not carrying it out properly.
David Cameron told MPs in May that he was considering advice after the National Audit Office cast serious doubt on how wise it was to keep putting money into the scheme.
Whitehall sources confirmed that the decision had been made because of coalition cost-cutting and the ongoing problems.
"It was meant to be a very helpful thing for NHS staff and patients but instead has become this amazingly top-heavy, hideously expensive programme. The problem is, it didn't deliver", a Department of Health source told the Guardian.
"It was too ambitious, the technology kept changing, and loads and loads of money has been put into it. It's wasted a lot of money that should have been spent on nurses and improving patient care, and not on big international IT companies." µ
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the government are good at giving vast amounts of public funds money to large corporations because they have had a lot of practice.
then the politicians retire to a directorship of the aforementioned corporation and rake in loads of personal wealth.
public funds are THE most guaranteed payment in the commercial world and it is what corporations fight for because there is no delay, no argument, no fuss it just gets handed over without any consideration for good value or blatant corruption
dont even get me started on the privatisation of essential services
money loving scum
The people speccing the project up won't have a clue what is needed but will plough on with a vague fluffy objective of keeping everyone happy. Docs will hate the whole thing and be pissy about everything they see in the project - they'll see mundane stuff like touching a keyboard and being repsonsible for data as being beneath them. And because they're superheroes of the NHS they';re beyond being told to shut the eff up and do their job like everyone else is. Meanwhile the software companies just keep charging by the hour.
I seem to recall reading on this very site that one of the major issues with the whole NHT project was the fact that nobody at the top of NHS seemed to be able to make a decision and stick to it.
In other words, the IT companies were working towards constantly shifting goalposts.
Now I'm not saying the IT companies are not to shoulder some of the blame (they should have had the balls to call it quits when enough was enough), but I don't think they should be blamed for absolutely everything.
More proof that the cost of education is rising and increasingly out of reach of the average citizen.
12.7 billion!! OMG! How can any IT system cost SO much! i mean what kind of hardware/software costs 12.7 billion?
How hard can it be to set up a central database and link GP surgeries, hospitals via a VPN. What about amazon cloud storage?
Will the IT companies who so dismally failed to provide a useable program now compensate the UK government for their failure? If not, why not?
I am an expat here in Andalucia Spain and now on the Spanish health sevice.I recently visited the doctor and within a week had all results (X ray Blood Test Urine ECG). The point I am making is that all the information was on their IT system what looked like windows XP. Even the Xrays were available as images. Bet it didnt cost billions!
I wonder how many operations could have been carried out had £12.7 billion not been spent on this programme.