The wrong way to fix the NHS

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, is a decent and well-meaning man. He’s genuinely excited about the new, radical reforms planned for the NHS which he announced last weekend. I have been told that Hunt and his old friend David Cameron see this restructuring of the NHS as the next great step, as significant and successful as Gove’s education reform; something the Prime Minister will be remembered for gratefully in 100 years’ time. I’m afraid they’re wrong. If implemented as announced, these plans will be both expensive and ineffective.

The main trouble is that Hunt’s NHS revamp will rely on a vast, integrated and enormously complicated IT system. The idea is that eventually all patients’ electronic records will be available ‘at a click’. But governments just aren’t competent to deliver or commission this sort of grand IT project —- as we’ve seen time and again. Yes, of course it sounds like a great idea: ‘making the health service paperless by 2018’. But we’ve been here before. NHS Connect cost the taxpayer £13 billion before it was abandoned as unworkable and technically impossible. Long after that scheme was dropped, we are still committed to pay the IT supplier another billion pounds. This is how bad the government is at writing contracts. In a utopian health service, nationwide electronic patient records might be a good idea. In practice, ask yourself why they have never been adopted by any other country with a health service comparable to ours.

The NHS can manage well without them. In the non-emergency situation, the general practitioner referring the patient should give an account of past medical history. In the emergency situation, the patient can almost always provide an adequate amount of medical history. Most know the names and doses of the drugs they are taking. If not, they usually carry a ‘repeat prescription’ list with them.