UK health service has £1.5B to put toward Digital Workplace Solutions 2: Electric Boogaloo

The UK's National Health Service is on the hunt for tech suppliers to become part of a commercial agreement that could be worth up to £1.5 billion over four years. Through its commercial purchasing organization, NHS Shared Business Services (SBS), the UK's public healthcare provider is looking to start conversations with …

[Pascal Monett]

"together with limits to its budget"

Limits to its budget ?

For an organization that has been pissing money away for nothing since at least ten years, it's budget is obviously not limited enough.

If they had less money to fool around with, they'd have to do something actually productive with what they had.

Then they could build on it bit by bit, instead of having all these massive ideas that end up going nowhere and costing everything.

[Steve Button]

FTFY.

"The NHS is trying to recover from the demand created by unnecessarily shutting everything down in response to the pandemic."

They could have carried on with regular care, instead of shutting almost everything down and making it a National Covid Service. This was entirely predictable, and in fact was predicted by many of us.

[NeilPost]

Re: FTFY.

The rot on the NHS started many years before COVID. There is a direct correlation to the endless ducking about by the Conservative Government and their election in 2010.

[Contrex]

When I saw the headline I read the capital B as a figure 8 and thought 'the NHS has £1.58 to put towards...' and thought 'Christ, the Tories have screwed us over even worse than I thought'.

[codejunky]

Solutions!

"The NHS is trying to recover from the unprecedented demand created by the pandemic, together with limits to its budget."

So spend the money on tech? Not medical tech, not operators of medical tech, not doctors, not nurses, not offloading of bed blockers (not necessarily the patients fault either), not ripping up the inefficiency for dealing with patients or breaking apart fiefdoms.

And as someone mentioned above not borking the 'health service' for covidpanic would have relieved the problem before it began. But we got more tiktoks so the pay bump was deserved. The NHS can have a slow clap

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Solutions!

"covidpanic" Isn't that a term coined by the rightwing/antivaxx/wellbeing alliance of whackos that coalesced during the pandemic where actual people actually died of Covid?

[codejunky]

Re: Solutions!

@AC

""covidpanic" Isn't that a term coined by the rightwing/antivaxx/wellbeing"

No idea. Its a term used by people who didnt agree with what was being pushed regardless of affiliation. So they probably use it to to describe the covid panic that occurred.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Barking up the wrong tree?

Replacing network gear and server tin, well that’s commodity stuff. But software, surely NHS is big enough to want to write its own? Or at least to carve it up into smallish chunks with interface specs, style guides and use cases, and invite teams of developers (including one-person shops) to develop apps that actually meets the needs of staff? Then refresh every few years to make sure the apps are keeping relevant.

[Abominator]

Re: Barking up the wrong tree?

The NHS is run by fucktards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Barking up the wrong tree?

I can't quite decide if this is sarcasm or optimism ;)

The truth is (as I will say every time El Reg publishes one of these articles) there is no such thing as a UK NHS - there's an eye watering amount of interlinked organisations involved in delivering patient care (and all the administration that goes with it) and it can pretty accurately be described as "ferrets in a sack".

[ecofeco]

1.5B?

I'm going to bet the B stands for bollocks.

About 1.5 billion pounds worth.