Australia hires former head of controversial UK care.data plan

The Australian government's love affair with digitisation experts from the United Kingdom continues, with former National Health Service (NHS) digital head Tim Kelsey made boss of the antipodean Digital Health Agency (successor to the National e-Health Transition Agency). The leave moves Telstra Health shy a director, since …

[Adrian Midgley 1]

Well, he needed

a new job, because the old one was not going to continue.

Follows a lot of English doctors out to the Colonies, but is he part of the solution?

Or the problem.

[Sebastian A]

The care.data rollout sounds very similar to the Windows 10 rollout. Are you sure he didn't do some moonlighting at Microsoft?

[Winkypop]

If it doesn't work out for him (us)

There's always a job at The Australian Bureau of Statistics....

[Anonymous Coward]

deja vu?

am I right thinking this is not the first, or the 2nd mega-project that burns through a tidy pile of cash in th UK and then the boss moves on, to a land far, far away, where they give him another pile to burn? In a way, it's a wonderful career: proven history of failure lands you the next Big Job. And once through with Aussie funds, his chances of getting one in California, say in 5 years' time, look even brighter!

[Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis]

Our (UK) gain

Aus loss

[imanidiot]

how in the world

How does someone who has already proven himself to be completely inadequate for the job get the position anyway? Is everyone involved in the project unable to read? Is this guy such a "charmer" he can talk his way past a report saying he was terrible at his job? It just boggles the mind!

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: how in the world

"How does someone who has already proven himself to be completely inadequate for the job get the position anyway?"

I think it tells you a lot about the attitudes of those making the appointments.

[GrumpyOldBloke]

Re: how in the world

The first requirement of working with the public sector is not success or failure but fitting into the public sector way of working. In this context someone from the the motherland is like a god here.

[Adam 52]

Aren't we supposed to have stopped sending our criminals to Australia?

[BebopWeBop]

Yeh, we are self sufficient now. Likewise politicians (a subset) despite the odd rash import.

[Anonymous Coward]

As with all Gremlins....

Don't feed him after midnight!........that's where the UK went wrong.

[Moving Pictures]

First police, then rail, now health.

Why do we always end up with your losers?

There's something up. We're quite capable of doing this stuff ourselves, but we seem to bring in failed British people to try doing the same project out here - thinking it'll work this time.

Madness.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: First police, then rail, now health.

Well, we used to send them all to Scotland, but after the general Election they decided they weren't going to take anymore shit from us, so....sorry about that:(

[Diogenes]

First the census , now this ...

With apolgies to Cato the Elder

Ceterum censeo factio Liberalis esse delendam or the shorter version

factio Liberalis delenda est !

(Apologies if the latin is not quite correct)

[rtb61]

Future Fun

Here is a fun and interesting fact. Next time there is a major solar flare pointing at earth, thousands of people will die in hospitals on the side of the planet receiving the results of that flare, no, seriously.

Abandoning all manual record keeping system means, that when the entire network infrastructure goes down and takes months to repair because, no automated systems and no manual system to organise that repairs, means hospitals prescription and treatment information will simply not be available and depending which side faces when, either thousands will die or tens even hundreds of thousands will die.