NHS 23
David Farber <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.people.interesting-people |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Begin forwarded message: From: Brian Randell <[email protected]> Date: October 18, 2006 3:43:38 AM EDT To: [email protected] Subject: NHS 23 Hi Dave: I alerted you to the wiki that I and others have set up concerning the UK National Health Service's "National Programme for IT" merely by adding you to the cc list of a message sent to a number of colleagues. Thus I omitted to make it clear that I thought you might well find it appropriate to draw the IP list's attention to this wiki, given that it concerns the problems of what is claimed to be "the world's biggest civil IT procurement ever!", intended to connect "over 30,000 GPs in England to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal health and care information, transforming the way the NHS works". By way of a taster let me quote what has appeared on the (London) Times' web-site about our wiki: Compute this (12 Oct 2006) Daniel Finkelstein's Rolling Guide to the Best Opinion on the Web, Times Online http://www.timesonline.typepad.com/comment/ "NHS 23 is a fascinating and horrifying site. It provides an account of the repeated warnings given to Parliament by 23 of the UK's most respected IT academics about the multi-billion pound NHS computer project. They basically warned from the beginning that a fiasco loomed. Take this: "As experts in complex systems, we are concerned that the NHS National Program for IT (NPfIT) is starting to show many of the symptoms displayed by large IT and business change projects that have failed in the past. We have a wide range of IT backgrounds and experience, and have studied many failed projects, as well as many that succeeded. Our professional opinion is that a constructive, independent review is urgently needed." It was written to the Commons' Health Committee in May 2004. Last week, they had to send the same letter again. Anyway, you can pretty much stop anywhere on the site and read about an unfolding multi-billion pound scandal." The wiki is at: http://nhs-it.info Cheers Brian -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = [email protected] PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/