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.