The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Elastoplastoclasm

We all know, because the Government has told us, that New Labour and its Glorious Successor have spent more money on the National Health Service than any previous government, and possibly more than any government in history has ever before spent on just about anything. Here is where some of it went. The National Programme for IT, whose acronym spells out an appropriately inarticulate splutter, "aims to create a centralised medical records system for 50 million patients in England". The Government claims (or "believes", according to the Press Association's Journalistic Telepathy Unit) that "this will benefit patient care and could prove vital in an emergency". What it has actually done, at an overall cost of twelve thousand million pounds, is increase the workload of staff, reduce the number of patients who can be treated, and put the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead ten million out of pocket. "I had been led to believe it would all work," commented the hospital's hapless chief executive. A spokesbeing from the Department of Health Service Privatisation said that the Government was "learning lessons" from the fiasco, which lessons are expected "to help us improve further deployments". It must be a great comfort for all those patients to know that their non-treatment has contributed in some small way to the very real possibility that the next foul-up will be slightly more spectacular than the present one.

If any further consolation were needed, the Government also plans "an online booking system, e-prescriptions and fast computer network links between NHS organisations", with sharing of information between health professionals, pharmacists, hackers, selected passengers on public transport and the more socially responsible members of the business community.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home