View Single Post
Old 19-01-2017, 12:04   #169
tweetiepooh
Virgin Media Employee
 
tweetiepooh's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Winchester
Services: Staff MyRates BB: VM XXL TV: VM XL Phone : VM XL
Posts: 3,107
tweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appeal
tweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appealtweetiepooh has a bronzed appeal
Re: Crisis in the NHS

It really doesn't matter how much money you put into the NHS it would never be enough. There would always be someone, somewhere who fell through the net because of some reason or another.

The NHS does need to be run better but how? If the people who do the running are also the ones "profiting" from any mechanism put in place how is it ever going to work.

Sometimes though things are the wrong way round with suppliers controlling things. The NHS network is a case in mind. I worked on a hospital patient system for years. It was getting more complex and we were starting to integrate with some clinical data (scan images) and this was in the old MSDOS days. But there was a set of manuals on the shelf that detailed different data items and what values to use. So gender you have 1=male, 2=female, 3=neonate...8=not given, 9=unknown. We used the supplied manuals to write our system so when we needed to send data for central processing (anonymised for stats purposes) we were OK.
Problem - a US supplied lab system was bought and we had to integrate to it but it didn't understand the idea of "a patient". It knew about "an inpatient" and "an outpatient" but not simply the person who could be either (or in our hospital both at same time). We did the work and it was fine, we didn't need the data back at that time.

The issue is that different health suppliers have bought different platforms and these don't talk the same "language". Diagnostic and general coding can be different ICD, Read, proprietary. But that really shouldn't be a problem. The system can use what ever but the interface to the NHS network needs to speak NHS data. So query arrives in NHS speak, the system then needs to translate, do work, translate the answer to NHS speak back to the requester. The NHS dictates how data is formatted and transmitted. It just seems the vendors are trying to make the NHS a polyglot and do all the work.

I'm sure there are other projects with such control issues. All not helped by not having good managers because you've promoted your best clinical and technical staff who may not be good managers leaving less good staff (who could make excellent managers) left to do the actual work.
__________________
I work for VMO2 but reply here in my own right. Any help or advice is made on a best-effort basis. No comments construe any obligation on VMO2 or its employees.
tweetiepooh is offline   Reply With Quote