…to anyone. Even those building the NHS computer system don’t think it will work:
Labour’s multi-billion- pound project to create the NHS’s first ever national computer system "isn’t working and isn’t going to work", a senior insider has warned.
The
damning verdict on the ambitious £20 billion plans to store patients’
records, and allow people to book hospital appointments, on a central
computer network has been delivered by a top executive at one of the
system’s main suppliers.
How many billions of taxpayers’ money has been wasted on this?
What ministerial resignations are in prospect?
When I read these stories, time and again I am stunned by the numbers involved. How can any IT project cost £20 billion? Does anyone have a figure for the total development costs of, say, every incarnation of Microsoft operating systems, from QDOS to Vista. Is it anywhere near $40 billion?
I just can’t make the numbers come out right. There’s something like 30,000 GPs in the UK, right? Are we honestly meant to believe that the cost of this project is six hundred grand each? Provision of hardware is cheap, so this has got to be mostly labour costs. Does what on the face of it seems a fairly simple distributed database application really require the hundreds of thousands of man years of work that 2 x 10^10 pounds represents?
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