

NHS staff should code - Kelsey - colethecoder
http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/ehi/8101
Tim Kelsey, the NHS Commissioning Board’s first national director of patients and information, is to encourage doctors and nurses and other front-line staff to learn how to program.
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eckyptang
I was in a hospital the other day with my wife. I watched a senior consultant
try and find a printer in AD (because the one on his desk was broken). This
was to print a request form. It was very hard for him. The form exists because
they have two systems with a paper integration path between them. There is
some ceremony involved as well, because there is a quota on how many
outstanding forms they can be processing. There is also a restriction on when
the appointment can be made resulting in a weird set of rules which are
virtually impossible to deal with effectively. The staff are completely
depressed at having to deal with this every day.

Instead of wasting more money on this shitty PR exercise, perhaps they should
fire Kelsey and all quango-esque departments and middle management who bought
this, fire the outsourced idiots who built pieces of crap like this and hire a
software team (google style!!!) to build new software and infrastructure
across the entire NHS from scratch on Open Source software.

The amount of money the NHS pisses up the wall on contractors and management
could build a country-wide system from scratch which solves all of these
issues. I mean firing five management consultants could hire people to build
an open source active directory replacement which would save millions in
license costs (OpenLDAP doesn't cut it so don't go there). Another five
management consultants would create a standard desktop operating system
country-wide based on a COTS Linux distribution. Another 20 management
consultants would replace a big chunk of the 105-or-so disjoint software
platforms.

In the mean time, they could surely afford some training for their staff, to
fix a few printers and to clean up poor integration paths like this. Then we
might get to see our consultants rather than watch them argue with Active
Directory.

Note: I've worked for the NHS before - it's an IT disaster, bar Guys & St
Thomas trust which actually have a clue stick.

~~~
poissonpie
Yah. I currently work for the NHS as a developer. Don't even get me started on
this place - inefficiency upon inefficiency. Printers? holy cow, we've just
installed "follow me printing" and because it was badly communicated and
thought out, we now have several departments who can't print a damn thing
because they are waiting on a pass code so they can set up their swipe card to
allow them to print. Did I mention there is only 1 machine in the building
that you can use to set up your card for printing? aiya.

Kelsey? I'll believe it when I see it - I tried to get hold of him informally
a while ago about his coding4health...I got crickets.

~~~
ktizo
_I tried to get hold of him informally a while ago about his coding4health...I
got crickets._

I think you can get a cream for that.

~~~
poissonpie
otc or would i have to get a prescription?

~~~
ktizo
Prescription only, I'm afraid. The doctor needs to check that you have a fully
working conscience first before eliminating the crickets, ever since that
messy business involving the wooden boy.

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Craigangus
Using data smartly in the NHS is key to making it more effiecient.

I witnessed £1 million wasted on writing a piece of software that potentially
could have saved the NHS millions but due to bad management and politics was
eventually cancelled.

This despite the fact that a NHS board manager had already created a similair
system, himself through self taught coding in an Access database

~~~
eckyptang
Agree about using data but the main problem is trust autonomy which allows
them to develop incompatible systems. For example every damn A&E department in
the country has a different software platform or configuration. There should
just be one!

Oh that and NHS management, who should just be put up against a wall and shot.
If you divide it across all trusts, each directorate member has pissed about
20 million of cash out of the window on stuff that hasn't delivered.

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danielgrieve
As a web developer within the NHS (though in Scotland) I can already tell you
that the problem won't be that NHS staff can't code, but will be that they
won't be allowed to code.

The main issue is always the archaic IT department who lock down computers,
rendering them near useless. That would be the first place to start. Then we
can start teaching our staff to do something other than create a Word document
and visit their staff Intranet.

~~~
robgough
The biggest risk here would surely be that around PID (Patient Identifiable
Data). Who is responsible for ensuring the safety of this data?

As it is right now, it's ultimately the trusts themselves (as is my
understanding), but what safeguards will there (or could there) be in place to
keep this data safe.

And what about that data? Do we force any new staff-written applications to
create their own MPI etc. or do we let them access the main systems through
some kind of API? In which case, that would need creating - and interfacing to
a variety of different software is never simple. If it's all to stay on the
internal network, then who hosts these apps - and where does that budget come
from?

There are a lot of big questions and potential risks here and I'd be very
interested to see what these eye-catching initiatives turn out to be. Until I
see evidence to the contrary, I remain pessimistic about these being anything
but trivial and largely pointless.

If this was a serious effort, why ask the doctors, nurses and other clinical
staff to learn to code - and not reach out to the open-source development
community and ask them for their help. I'm sure a great many developers have,
or know someone, who has used the NHS and would love to have a part in making
things better.

~~~
danielgrieve
I have to agree with pretty much all of your points.

Securing Patient Identifiable Data should be near (if not at) the top of the
list of priorities. Some API where data can be requested which only returns
non-PID data would probably be the way forward, but there will certainly be
cases where there is a need for certain data that will be identifiable.

I'd probably say that NHS staff don't need to learn how to code, but should
instead work much closer with those who can.

As in an "insider" there is an endless list of services that could be improved
with software if we could just open our doors slightly.

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ktizo
Well, at least this will give health professionals job security in the games
industry if the government downsizes healthcare. Anyone up for a game of Sim-
Hospital?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Personally, I'm more of a fan of Bulfrog's _Theme Hospital_.

