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Over the past week it has become apparent that Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor, is to cut funding for IT in the NHS. In particular, Darling highlights the NHS IT system and the scheme to make all patient records electronically accessible from any GP or Hospital in the country as not essential to the ‘frontline’. This is a terrible state of affairs; on a broader scale it is clear that government have become convinced that cuts in the public sector are required to manage the UK’s economy after the impact of quantitative easing and national indebtedness, but on a scale more local to the NHS it suggests an arbitrary characterisation of things the NHS do that are important and other things the NHS do.

Sure, to most people the NHS is the organisation that looks after the doctors that look after your health, thus the frontline function is healthcare. However as with all complex systems, of which the NHS is certainly one of the prime examples, the effective operation of the frontline is inextricably connected to the system’s ability to perform other core functions, particularly administration. Without wanting to sound facetious, administration drives the global economy and the performance outcomes of major companies, without this performance, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and attitude all go wanting. In the NHS sometimes it seems that the only way to standstill is to keep pushing forward, in light of new disease, the dynamic social situation of the UK, failing premises and reportedly falling standards. Thus, for a new centralised IT backbone that brings the NHS system upto a standard that most would consider essential, and possibly shocking that one was not already in place, to be cancelled in light of budget decisions is serious indeed.

In my personal experience it is evident that the NHS is not wholly blessed with technological innovation, in the past year I’ve still filled out paper-based forms for enrollment in doctors, seen my records passed around in a cardboard sleeve and had appointments recorded in a paper diary. On an academic level I’ve learnt of databases such as the NHSCR which records patient registrations to GPs and uses a language I believe called ‘MUMPS’ designed in some past time, and not at all accessible to a humble user of SQL, and had to reconfigure a template to read mortality registers into Microsoft Access. The research that I, and many others are conducting, could change the way in which public services operate but only if the data is available and accessible – who knows what kind of good could be achieved through spatial analysis of and data mining of a central database of NHS care records? The government aren’t looking ahead because it never pays to look ahead when an election is forthcoming.

Some news articles and comment on this topic: here, here, here and here.