UK health secretary confirms end for NHS Digital, architect of the GP data grab debacle The UK health secretary has confirmed the demise of NHS Digital and NHSX, the organisations that take various roles in NHS IT strategy and execution. In an internal email seen by The Register, Matthew Gould, CEO of NHSX, said that his organisation, along with NHS Digital, would be incorporated into NHS England's Transformation …
From past experience this will result in the same people doing the same jobs at the same desks only with different headed notepaper. Half the staff will quit and come back as contractors on five times the salary. Expensive branding will be undertaken. Capita and co will make a fortune. NHS digital efforts will be same or worse.
'HealthScale(TM): your health, internet scale'.
'HealthScale(TM): health solutionising at web scale'.
'HealthScale(TM): not at all run by Dido Harding who is certainly not getting paid at all by us'.
'HealthScale(TM): we care about your health, but we don't have scales and are not lizards. None of these statements is true.'
'HealthScale(TM): leveraging our scales to put our digits where they should not be'.
Well, when 'CLAS' (CESG Listed Advisor Scheme) of the Communications-Electronics Security Group of the Government Communications Head Quarters was 'in bad odour' with HMG recently, it was completely disbanded and replaced with the National Cyber Security Centre, which, needing people skilled in protecting HMG IT assets, and finding a whole load of them unaccountably available, got them all.
But at least they moved some of the people to London.
It's the same story with Buckinghamshire Council, the result of a five way merger between the district and county councils, but run as if it is still five separate councils. So much for the promised cost savings and efficiency improvements by pooling staff and resources.
We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
― Petronius Arbiter
Same at IBM. We had name changes as geographic areas were re-ringfenced, and a manager I never interacted with as they were so many, many levels of management above was moved sideways into an exciting new opportunity while someone from a department I'd never heard of took over that re-defined role,. and,... well, nothing changed. The new manager would have a fad, we had 'Rhythm and Blues', '20/20', GDF, Lean, but they didnt actually achieve anything.Although apparently it was very important we all used the same custom made font for internal communications, because someone in marketing thought the way the message was conveyed, was more important than 'The Dept we've just onboarded is going to take months to achieve compliance so I'm going to need outages every weekend for a month, and overtime approval'. Stuff you can only say in a Sans Serif variant, apparently.
You can't hire a deckchair positioning officer until all the logo designers and marketing people and supporting HR roles are filled.
Unfortunately after paying the recruitment consultants and non-exec directors there won't be any budget left for actual deckchair movement - but there will be a mission statement about it.
I wouldn't have used "Turbocharging", seems 1980s to me. "Enabling" might be better.
Also "achievement to achieve", doesn't read well either.
The code reviewer in me suggests...
"We seek to level up the NHS Digital Vision to synergise brand awareness and achieve a fusion of technology and people, enhancing our ability to achieve our aspirational missions and realise a global Britain as we build back better"
Obligatory XKCD, namely the part about the carbon neutral servers.
let them make decisions on the infrastructure. Ooh, shiny!
Many many years ago I worked for a small company that had an application deployed in the NHS. At one point, the DoH wondered whether we could move over to using the NHS Spine as authentication instead of our smartcard so we had a series of meetings with the NHS Spine people.
At no point in those meetings did we get to speak to anyone technical. And, using the documentation provided, we estimated that doing so would quadruple the size of our application and make it hugely less reliable so we stuck to using our smartcards.
Of course, it eventually all came to an end - the DoH set up an 'advisory committee' to evaluate the use of our application and, surprise surprise, several members were from our huge competitor and the committee eventually recommended that our functionality get folded into their application and ours be discontinued - much to the displeasure to the NHS staff that actually used our application.
Corrupt? I couldn't possibly comment.
The NHS SPINE authentication was originally designed, and intended, to be done locally (hence the PKI). However, when the NHS higher-ups were told about this, and the, inevitable but small costs of each practice, PCT etc. running their own authentication server, they insisted that authentication be done centrally.
This resulted in the enormous delays for NHS staff logging on to the system, and their practice of just leaving the card in the reader to avoid the 90second wait. Incidentally, originally as implemented (many years ago and it has been fixed now) any one of the thousands of KMtaj agegakuh sseinf inf* could delete everyone's access privileges, including their own, thereby shutting down the whole of the NHS!
*Now, now, you didn't expect me to actually say who could do it, did you? ;o) (But, actually, yes, they could have.)
You might have noticed this sometimes on the TV news broadcasts about Covid. "The latest change to the red/amber/green status only applies in England. Viewers elsewhere have their own programme."
People in England don't have to wear masks on public transport. They do in Scotland. Which makes things entertaining when choo-choos cross the border.
So now having blown their chance to sell all our NHS data they have decided that the old names are too scandel ridden and are now "ReBranding" for their next attempt to sell our medical data to their pondscum friends.
I have ZERO problem with the NHS using medical data to improve the NHS and medical care. We already do large scale trials. Being able to use the entire NHS dataset to find hotspots, issues etc would improve things.
I have a Farkton of issues with tory friends selling it to their pals for abuse. No No NO and FUCK No.
B’locks to yet another clusterflock courtesy of the government boffins who can’t share my damn hospital records in Berkshire to my GP in south Buckinghamshire. I had to copy pages of records and email to my GP surgery or they’d have nary a clue why/what was done for the 10 days I was on ward at Wexham Park.
In the end yet again the taxpayers get screwed for billions and the luvvies will laugh all the way to Monte Carlo
/past/epic/fail
A reduction in departments yet more money spaffed
It's happened before - some minister announced from the dispatch box that they were going to reduce headcount at the DoH.
Their solution? Spin out loads of staff to some new organisations (NHS Employers being one of them). There were a number of issues with this:
1. Their pay and benefits still came out of the DoH budget.
2. Because they were no longer DoH staff, they had no authority to actually mandate how their budget was spent but could only recommend to the DoH.
3. The DoH therefore had to grab new staff to evaluate the recommendations (and also to mostly replace the people who had been transferred since their job-role still needed to be done).
So the end result was that the DoH budget grew, staff became duplicated between the two organisations and people who formerly had a job role to actually *do* something became a set of advisors. All so that some pompous minister could stand up in Parliament and boast how they had cut the DoH headcount (at that point in time anyway - luckily he didn't have to say it again 2 years later).
Bah. Politics.
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