Posts by Dave the Cat 120 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2012
OzBob,
I quite agree, as a former Royal of ten years service now working in NHS IT, I'm quite amazed at some of the hostility I have recieved when people find out I used to be a Marine. You'd swear it was my job description to rape and pillage at every opportunity. Oh how I wish it was..... ;-)
"I've even seen one project rejected on the basis that the sales guy turned up in a car more expensive than the customer! "
This happened in the NHS? I'm pretty jaded with the whole NHS IT senario but even I have to call bullshit at that one. Don't believe it.
Disclaimer: I work in NHS IT. I see this $hit everyday. People need to grow a pair and stand up to their finance/procurement departments and shop around. It's nothing short of lazy and incompetent not to do so.
If NHS trusts are paying over the odds for IT equipment it boils down to one of three things:
1) Incompetence on the part of the procurement departments.
2) Finance/Procurement managers taking back-handers.
3) Just not giving a flying f**k and having no pride in their work.
Pay a visit to your finance/procurement managers house and see how much nice new shiny kit they have, usually stamped with the logo of the company that recently won the "competitive bidding process". Seriously, I have seen this with my own eyes in a previous NHS job. It does happen, far too often and it stinks. I've reported my concerns on several occasions and each time it was brushed under the carpet to save the blushes of the fraudster concerned.
Specialist IT procurement needs to be done by people who actually know what they are doing, not procurement departments who try to overrule IT on every purchase thinking they know where to get stuff cheaper. They know $hit all, and are usually staffed by people too stupid to get a job stacking shelves, only a public sector body could employ these people. No private business would tolerate them, as evidenced by the last fu*kup ad order sent to dell for "200 x Computers" that's it, no spec, no model, no nothing.
I now do all the IT ordering at our department because procurement couldn't be trusted to get it right. We get frankly fantastic deals from most of our suppliers, and pay less than the public rate at all of them. The PCs we buy cost £1200 to the public on the Dell's website, we pay significantly less than half.
As AC @ 12.04 says there also needs to be some parity between comparisons. We, by edict from them upon high in central gov, have to buy encrypted memory pens to 256 FIPS standard, these are considerably more expensive than a standard 4gb memory pen. Often the comparisons that lead to these stories don't think about that, they just see the headline grabbing price figure.
@ Tom Welsh
Hey bugger off! The English already flooded several valleys so you could steal our water to feed Brum and Scouseland. You're not having any more unless you can figure out a way of directing some more of that sun you get in the South East our way! As someone else suggested above maybe a giant mirror in space or something. But we are definate on this, no sun, no water! ;-)
@ Despairing Citizen
Agree with everything you say. You speak the truth sir.
It's the same throughout the public sector. I work in IT for the NHS and it's exactly the same here. Thankfully the lower payscale workers (i.e. anyone who isn't senior management or a doctor) now recieves training on data protection issues.
However with inevitable predictability it's the senior managers and doctors, who can't be bothered to turn up because they''re far too important, who are the main culprits of data protection breaches.
I'd love to list off the examples I've seen with my own eyes but again with inevitable predictability the senior managers and doctors concerned walk away totally and utterly scott free while if I were to mention the breaches here and got found out I'd be out on my arse faster than you can say Data Protection Act.
NHS Reform? Yeah, sack half the managers. No one would ever notice. I promise.
Did you even read the post?
For once it sounds like this particular NHS trust is doing things the right way, you know with a limited trial and what not.... then an evaluation and then a roll out, if warranted, or a trip back to the drawing board if not. Not sure which trust sends it's evaluation staff to Barbados, but clearly I'm working for the wrong one!
While I understand your skepticism, as I work in NHS IT I have a healthy dose of that already, people keep banging on, on one hand about how the NHS needs to modernise and "get with the times" and then on the other hand people jump up and down crying about what a waste of money it is to buy nurses laptops. Granted in your wife's case it does sound like the rollout was nothing short of piss poor, and the manager deserves to be sacked (though of course never will sadly) but give us a break.
I don't think you understand how archaic and disprate some NHS IT systems are, what will work in one trust won't work in another, somewhere, guaranteed. This is why the NPfIT failed so spectacularly. Well, that and the fact the snake oil salesmen fed the politicos a truckload of BS.
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