Oh no not again.

The Party loves cards. They are no different to when in junior school certain individuals devised a gang and allowed only certain people to join their “gang” but you could only be a member if you had a “card” issued by the “leader”. No card and you were not in the “in” crowd.

This playground mentality unfortunately persists into adult life as both left and right wing extremist parties have all had similar party card schemes. The NHS is no different for it too issues cards. These actually have a protective function for patients for if they see any individual carrying one they should run a mile.

When we go to meetings there is always a group of people who have been in the bottom third of any Northernshire comprehensive school who got prizes for turning up once or twice a year in a corner forming a circle and instantly identified by the NHS (Dumb) Smartcard wrapped around their necks on an NHS necktie thinking it makes them look important.

They think wearing a NHS Dumbcard round their neck is a sign of “corporate identity” but it is actually a sign of corporate incompetence.

The teams’ attention has been drawn to this website, and this one and another one too and yet another Party card.

What a good idea your average Daily Mail reader will think. We can identify the evil ones, the devil’s spawn causing all UK hospital acquired infections by just giving them all a card. Excellent and by jingo we will have Cl. difficile on the run by Christmas. Another sherry vicar and how are all those wayward children you have been looking after recently?

Read the propaganda above. Look who is providing the information as to how they feel it is useful. Its Debbie, a nurse “consultant” in public health no less, in a sink PCT. Debbie clearly knows nothing but thinks a card will help all and she says so.

Perhaps Debbie (or more importantly her friends who put her up to this) has other ideas for those who should carry cards? Maybe a compulsory card around the neck for the following:

HIV/AIDS                                                                 85,500 (HPA 2009)
MRSA infections                                                        1898 (HPA 2010)
Illegal immigrants                                310,000- 570,000  (Home office 2005)

Working age benefit claiments       5.8 million (Department of Work and Pensions 2011)

The list is endless.

The point is what difference does such a card make? It only identifies those who have HAD Cl. difficile not those who MIGHT have it. If your card carrying patient needs an antibiotic that might cause Cl. difficile to treat a life threatening infection what will a doctor do if a patient presents the card to them?

Would they:

1) Refuse to treat the patient as per card? You might just get really ill rather than die?

2) Treat the patient to the best of their ability even though there is a risk of potentially serious consequences?

3) Do nothing? This is of course the NHS manager’s preferred option as it is cheap and the patient has a NHS sanctioned card?

4) Refer to Debbie who as a “consultant” will never be there before nine or after three?

5) Refer to an NHS manager – see 4?

6) Refer to the card issuer and ask the patient for their PIN? No PIN no treatment?

Whichever retarded Northernshire PCT (and there is more than one sink PCT playing card games) thought this up it has the same potential for discrimination as the Nazis and their yellow stars had. See the Press link above as to how the card would keep the superbug "out" of hospitals.

Given that 3% of the adult population in the UK have the potential for Cl. difficile infection and that Central Lancashire has a population of 457, 900 this means that 13,737 may have the potential for Cl.difficile infection.

So Debbie’s 222 cards (1.6% of potential cases) will make sweet FA difference as by using a high tech NHS stealth cards she will have hit the one latrine tent in a 100 square mile sector of barren desert and missed the huge army of several thousands marching towards her until these unknowns show up with the sh*ts but it is too late then. She will never have seen them as a nurse “consultant” in public health in a sink PCT will she because they do not carry the card?

Still cards are cheaper than real nurses just ask any “consultant” as they daily toil on the wards delivering hands on patient care to those with real Cl.difficile infections. For when real patients have Cl. difficile they want boots on the ground real hands on nursing and medical care even if that means getting someone covered in the proverbial. For when you are seriously ill that is what counts.

Not a card.

Praise be to the Party for ensuring that diversity training for NHS managers means the same as the Shorter Oxford Dictionary word discrimination.

Prescribing creep.

If you have not yet discovered the peculiar style of the medical blogger the Witch Doctor you may not be aware of the concept of creep. If we can try and precis many of Witchypoo’s posts, it is the process by which change is imposed by subtle small changes within an alleged democratic society to the point that the end result is that which a totalitarian state would impose from the start.

Think Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or Za Nu Labour’s attack on the NHS and you might get an idea of the general method of creep aka REFORM for the better that ultimately leads to a worse net end result albeit by small, subtle changes all passively approved for no-one sees or realizes the bigger picture.

This process is still ongoing and recently surfaced in seemingly innocent, but ultimately insidious, developments in the way a small Northernshire GP practice accesses their own patients’ medical records and issues their repeat prescriptions.

A few years ago we had some visits from what we shall term the Al Qaeda school of radical pharmacists who were employed by the local Soviet. This clique had done some Party sponsored “audits” and it would seem that certain prescribing criteria were deficient in their humble ill informed, ignorant opinions.

As we sat around their campfires words of revolutionary zeal like “concordance”, “equivalence” and “co-equivalence” were muttered but we drank their tea and coffee and thought “what are they talking about?” as we inhaled the smoke from their campfires long into the night.

None of these words had we ever heard before in the first world we inhabit. Some of us had been educated in undergraduate pharmacology, clinical pharmacology and postgraduate lectures regarding pharmacology but we had never heard these holy words before. We had even met with pharmacists to discuss the dark arts of dispensing but never heard such magic words before.

We asked them from behind their masked faces to quote their sources. This was akin to prizing limpets from a rock, always a good way to identify those trying to shaft one, but eventually we got an answer. It would appear that the source of the radical Al Qaeda school of pharmacists is none other than an alleged university in the Midlands of the UK.

This university is not known for producing anything academic for when some of us were at school any parent with a thick child called Precious, who academically would struggle to only ever get to a minor Polytechnic, could always get them to go to an alleged “university” and do social sciences or media studies at this university and so get a “university” degree in a nousetoanyoneology.

So we wasted several hours of our time with these Al Qaeda operatives and came away thinking what a load of b*ll*cks. This painfully acquired but useless information was placed in the filing cabinet of the brain aka waste bin and left to do nothing useful.

Fast forward and the local Soviet are now promoting the Electronic Prescription Service and you can read the propaganda here. Remember Choose and Book? Another “paperless” centrally imposed system coming our way with all its benefits? Just read the propaganda. Things will surely be so much better like Choose and Book.

Well move on with the creep and have any other doctors noticed changes to the way they are being prompting to log into their Practice’s computer system?

Anyone noticed that whereas before each practice could set its own access rights for individual users and its own passwords there are now at least 2 prompts for a Party Card or NHS "Smartcard" when logging in?

Remember how under Za Nu Labour’s new GP contract responsibility for IT became the responsibility of the local Soviet aka PCT with no doubt efficiency savings, sorry comrades, new word is “gains”?

So where does all of this lead to?

Well the simple act of a GP reauthorizing a patient’s repeat medication led to a message saying that the prescription was not Party approved for the EPS system and one of the three holy words from earlier appeared on the screen.

As a result the practice’s computer system would not allow a GP to issue a prescription for one of their patients because it did not comply with a central diktat. The prescription itself had no errors but the Party said no. It was not EPS compliant.

Result a hand written prescription as a GP could not issue the prescription. Result all details had to be entered manually so combined with the handwritten prescription progress had lengthened the simple act of issuing a repeat prescription. The thin end of a longer wedge in a paperless Electronic Prescription System?

So to our simple Northernshire minds the legacy of Soviet Za Nu Labour’s centralization of medicine, combined with radical Al Queda pharmacists means that GPs can no longer prescribe unless it meets Party approved “standards”.

By way of some other EPS bits all of our receptionists who have been trained by these radical pharmacists have asked us what do we think re EPS? Our replies have been curt as we had the same “training” from the same radicals a couple of years ago but all our staff have said the same one thing about the EPS.

It is a fraudster’s field day.

And best of all in order to use this pile of very expensive taxpayers’ funded useless pile of sh*te you will now need to use a Party Card or Smartcard. No doubt as our log in screens now prompt us to use a Smartcard we can see where this is going and it is not big or clever.

Praise be to the Party for ensuring that all who work for the Party will have to have a Party Card. We all know that the Party Card is there to protect your data from those who would want to hack it.

Or is it there for the Party to control those who are allowed to work, and especially prescribe, in medicine?

NHS Electronic Record Security

The supersecure NHS Smartcard prevents any unauthorised access to the system and provides positive proof that the holder works for the NHS.


Some of us here at ND Central are really sad.

Yes, we admit it, some of us enjoy computers and, yes, some of us read computer magazines to which we have subscriptions but we do also see and treat patients. We have done so for many years and amazingly this was once possible without the aid of the ubiquitous desktop computer. We still can but listen to any Party member and this is heresy as it is clearly inferior care especially when your pockets are lined as a result of NHS IT expenditure.

A small item caught our eye about the fact that the “super secure” and unhackable NHS Smartcard which restricts access of all but a few million to your medical records, if the Party has its way, might have been compromised in that someone has managed to hack the chip. Unfortunately we are unable to give you a link but if you have access to our source GP magazine more details can be found in 7th August 2009 edition pg 12.

It would appear that a court in one of the more liberal European countries called the Netherlands has ruled that details of how to do this can be published. If the article is to be believed it might have disastrous consequences for the smooth running of the health service. Imagine a PCT chief executive finding that their barrier controlled car parking space were to be taken by a hacker who has hacked the smartcard controlled barrier.

Of course they have been the official denials that security has not been compromised but it seems that more and more holes are appearing in the security of the ill thought out and expensive failure that is the leaking sieve of NHS computing confidentiality. We hacked it a couple of years ago after reading an article in the GP press and more recently another GP reported how easy it was to get into the demographic database. (The stasi know all about it before you get excited).

We suspect at some point he will be up before the GMC for a breach of patient confidentiality rather than being hailed as someone who drew attention to one of numerous flaws in the NHS computer policy. True Party members know that it is all perfect and that GPs who criticise it for being too slow, unreliable etc are all underworked, overpaid GPs who actually use the crap unlike those singing its praises who do not.

Still in this time of gloom there is a news item that the Conservatives, if elected, would ditch the NHS computing plan but read deeper, dear reader, and it says renegotiate the contracts which might mean an end to wasteful, needless, expenditure on computers but a wasteful, needless, expenditure, on contract bailout penalty clauses instead. Still we can live in hope.

Praise be to the Party who invented security and Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt and have built security further on these leading lights. Must be time to start learning Dutch . . .