NHS Is Still Reliant On Fax Machines
The title of this post as the same as that of an article in The Times last week.
This is the first paragraph.
Hospitals are still using 9,000 fax machines according to a survey that highlights the NHS’s with modern technology.
Other points from the article.
- The survey was done by the Royal College of Surgeons
- Newcastle on Tyne NHS Foundation trust had 603 machines.
- Barts Health uses 369 faxes.
- Only ten trusts said they didn’t own any faxes.
Coupled with another report last year, which showed that NHS hospitals still use an estimated 130,000 pagers, it surely shows the NHS is stuck in the past, as far as communications are concerned.
But this is not all!
A friend told me, he is trying to analyse the computer network of a trust, that stretches across three English counties.
These days, computers and complicated equipment usually have an address on the network, which in most organisations follow a logical pattern controlled by a sensible comprehensive specification.
But the NHS does things differently, with each county relying on one person in their area to create idividual node names.
How much could the NHS save, if they sorted out their communications and computing?
The Anonymous Widower 