Major IT outage forces UK emergency call handlers to use 'pen and paper' Tech services provider Advanced has taken part of its infrastructure offline as it tries to contain a suspected security incident, with a range of hosted applications not available to health customers, including NHS 111 emergency services. The outage began yesterday morning and isn't expected to be resolved until early next …
What the NHS is willing to do depends on how much money it has, and so if you continue to increase the amount of money then they will continue to find things to spend the money upon and it has passed the point that this is sustainable.
Personally, I feel that the NHS needs at least 3 distinct budgets. One for reactive maintenance (A&E?) one for long term maintenance (quality of life issues such as hip replacements) and another for what amounts to end of life care so you don't end up with one part of the NHS draining all of the funds from the other parts of the organisation.
Publication Pulse Today said yesterday a letter from NHS England's regional team warned General Practitioners – doctors – in London ....
Sorry, but "doctors" are people who have PhDs, and I suppose we all are not looking forward to being treated by a doctor in <fill in your personal favorite non-medical discipline>.
With that definition, and considering the El Reg commentards, we have some here who would be qualified to give you that prostate check up...
Then again, "title creep" seems to be wide spread. Even dictionaries seem confused...
physician
noun [ C ]
mainly US or formal /fɪˈzɪʃ.ən/
(UK usually doctor)
a medical doctor, especially one who has general skill and is not a surgeon
The latter addressed correctly as "mister" and not "doctor" of course...
"(UK usually doctor)
a medical doctor, especially one who has general skill and is not a surgeon
The latter addressed correctly as 'mister' and not 'doctor' of course..."
Sorry but don't try and impose your Americanisms here in the UK especially as this is a UK based item.
Plus UK surgeons can often also be referred to as "doctor" depending on their experience and seniority. You are confusing them with the much more senior "hosptial consultants" who are called "Mr/Mrs/Ms" to differentiate their higher seniority from more "lowly" doctors.
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors/life-and-work-in-the-uk/toolkit-for-doctors-new-to-the-uk/doctors-titles-explained
Absolutely...
Once consultants, especially surgical consultants, they can then behave like Sir Lanceleott Spratt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVWjAeAa52o
And while were on the subject of "titles", why is that some in the USA seem to get very upset about who can and can't call themselves "engineers" again all based on bits of paper and/or membership of a professional body. Despite some not actually being able to physically make anything themselves.
And yet in the USA you call train drivers "engineers". We prefer to call them more accurately "train drivers".
Fellowship, (in/) the FRCS, not a consultancy.
It is a bit outdated.
Probably several sociologists could earn their doctorates of philosophy (PhD) by contributing new understanding of why.
Meanwhile, doctorates in Philosophy followed doctors doing medicine and when natural philosophers got going theiy aspired to doctorates.
Philology, etymology, that's where to look.
I'm sorry too, but no American passport or location here, nor meant in the comment. Just Bologna Process, which is Italy ;)
But having said that it is also fair to say that the UK isn't the only one. That is the thing with human beings. Always looking to have something that distinguishes them from others. That is for example why some of my German colleagues (not that passport too before somebody thinks so ;) find that their biz cards are too small to fit all those prof. habil. dr. dr. dr. med. on there. Which is certainly not Bologna too. And since Bologna is in Italy, I am still surprised to see that there (not that passport too) people award me dott.ssa...
Don't worry about it.
One of our UK "eccentricities" LOL
And and as Fruit and Nutcase quite rightly pointed out
"Our Members of Parliament expect to be addressed as 'Honourable'..." and certain MPs on the Privy Council go by the title Right Honourable.
More like "the wheezers and dodgers" (though such a comparison is likely to insult the real Wheezers and Dodgers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Miscellaneous_Weapons_Development).
And as for "honourable" - if they shake your hand, be sure to check your wallet and watch after...
With a friend of mine from a European country, who's still in the emergency services (as I was, about five lives ago).
He was complaining about the fact that nowadays all the logistics and despatch stuff is to some extent or another "cloud-based", which relies on luxuries such as internet access or a functioning power grid, neither of which is a given in the event of a major issue.
Curiously, I understand the French system, while it kind of sucks day-to-day because it's so Spartan in some ways, is designed to be extremely resilient (much of the emergency response in France is either paramilitary in nature or down right military, as the gendarmerie and the Paris and Marseille fire battalions).
.... Adastra.
111 has become even worse than it was when it started. It is now completely useless.
Even 999 has deteriorated with some especially crap number pushing in some circumstances.
I had to phone both of them a couple of weeks back and it was really hard work.
I’m not talking about resources or waiting times here, I’m talking about the procedures.
Not good even before an outage.
We know systems will be compromised. It's fast becoming inevitable, no matter how comprehensive the security or how determined the management are when all is said and done defenders need to be lucky all the time, attackers only need to be lucky once. We need to start accepting that when we're designing, specifying and commissioning systems for critical infrastructure.
We need to look at enforcing diversity - multiple systems, multiple suppliers, multiple architectures, multiple access paths. Yes, that will introduce problems with interoperability but those shouldn't be insurmountable with careful design. We need to be mandating that level of diversity across the entire critical infrastructure - no one supplier, system or datacenter should be permitted to operate in more than a quarter of any given segment of critical infrastructure.
Monocultures are notoriously fragile (windows, I'm looking at you!) - they need to be avoided when dealing with life-critical services. Only by promoting diversity and actively discouraging monoculture can you both promote innovation and enhance the resilience of the system as a whole.
Critical Systems should be behind the HSCN network which is not public facing and you need a HSCN line to access.
If this wasn't the case why?
Also, I have never known any audit of the requirements for an HSCN line and have seen the form fraudulently filled out to get one. This means there is bound to be so many weak points to get onto this network.
Was when I was in education but we struggled as a school to get Advanced to meet our internal security expectations. They were eventually met. Again you are still down to the weakest member of staff working on your service.
I checked out the gCloud for Advanced's products and oh my
To start "Data is synchronously replicated between the two centres using Microsoft and web technologies including Hyper-V Server virtualisation and SQL Availability Groups. With the technology enabling a real time replica to be created at an alternate location, it provides operational continuity in the unlikely event of a partial or complete failure of either centre."
Then "Data is then in turn backed-up using Dell DR4100 Disk Backup Appliances, de-duped and then replicated in the alternate data centre. A full weekly backup is taken and a daily differential backup, each one being automatically verified with any inconsistencies automatically and immediately flagged to our team of database administrators."
And just in case you are not yet convinced "A combination of the data centres’ significant infrastructures and our active/active operating model therefore delivers a flexible, robust and proven approach to disaster avoidance and resilience and provides a high degree of business continuity"
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