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Comment by kozukumi | Hacker News Reader

The modern NHS system in the UK was the biggest fuck up I have ever seen. I worked with people who also worked on the project. They are seriously amazing people but apparently all the layers of management, red tape and politics was, according to my friends, the worst they have ever experienced. Two friends were so traumatised by the experience they ended up taking 2 years off work to travel/recover.

The sad thing is it shouldn't have been such a difficult thing to develop. Complex sure but no more complex than many other similar systems. It was destroyed by too much meddling from the government adding, removing and changing the spec every other day and many, many managers just finding non-sense jobs that were totally pointless.

It is shocking it went so over budget and was allowed to continue doing so for so, so long.

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Which NHS body in the UK are you talking about? There are four separate healthcare services in the UK which operate and are funded separately:

NHS Scotland

NHS England

NHS Wales

HSC Northern Ireland

NHS England - The National Programme for IT.

It is as far as I've seen the 'greatest' fuckup in UK development history, 12.something billion down the drain, massive overspending, they basically made every mistake you could make short of setting the office on fire.

They should make mismanagement of a government project become a felony.

> They should make mismanagement of a government project become a felony.

This would involve either:

(1) Clear and unambiguous definition of "mismanagement" involving distant-from-the-specific-project procedural mandates, which would reduce "mismanagement" by the definition applied but increase (and mandate) what would be functionally mismanagement for specific real projects (lots of government regulation designed to prevent mismanagement all around the world, while usually not specifically felony criminal rules, works this way now), or

(2) Being so ambiguous and vague so as to provide a basis for arbitrary prosecution, such that it would make sure no one wanted to touch management of a government project at all (at least -- assuming this was the US or one with similar fundamental rules as to what can be an enforceable criminal law -- until it was inevitably ruled unenforceable as impermissibly vague.)

It would indeed be a hard task to define what is "mismanagement", but spending billions of tax money earned by hard workers all around the country on salaries of incompetent people and fees from incompetent consultancies has at least to be slowed down, if not stopped. As civic responsibility is not enough, a higher level of control is needed. I am open to other solutions.

> It would indeed be a hard task to define what is "mismanagement", but spending billions of tax money earned by hard workers all around the country on salaries of incompetent people and fees from incompetent consultancies has at least to be slowed down, if not stopped. As civic responsibility is not enough, a higher level of control is needed.

Much of that waste is a product of the "higher level of control" adopted, in law and policy governing government IT work, in response to previous failures, which has mandated additional bureaucratic process, and causes more and more decisions to be made farther and farther from the people with either the specific business knowledge or the specific technical knowledge of the project being executed as more layers of "higher levels of control" are implemented.

I am not really sanguine about the prospects of more of the approach that has made things worse suddenly making things better instead.

Oddly, in the UK, there arguably already is. There is misconduct in public office and/or malfeasance in public office. Both have very tough penalties available.

They've been rarely used until more recently, when it's been a favorite for prosecuting police officers and police employees for egregious behavior resulting in deaths and injuries (where traditional charges such as manslaughter have failed to convince juries who are always reluctant to convict). The other favorite use is to prosecute civil servants for speaking to the media (aka. leaking).

However, no sign of it being used to deal with mighty screwups on government IT. I do like your thinking on this.

World history.

I do not know how the funding was split but NHS England was the primary however I would assume all NHS bodies put something into the pot for funding?

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