Some of the team have been in communicado by virtue of no internet access while the rest are with their families and cannot be bothered to blog. However a grainy TV picture in some of the more remote outposts of the world enabled us to see this latest government initiative from a far.
Well given every child protection report written says the information was there but not shared can you see how much this will achieve? If professionals police, social services, doctors, nurses etc. do not talk under current freedom of speech will a computer allow us as GPs to detect Johnny or Joanna Scrot child abuser or their abusees?
I'll just plug my Smartcard in and it will allow me to instantly access the police National Computer System, John and Jo's DNA that I just slipped off them when I shook their hands while telling them of their child's unexplained fracture and allow us to access all the local social services' children at risk registers?
Just look at some of the problems we have as GPs dealing with child protection issues at present. Our first port of call used to be our practice attached health visitors but the Party in its infinite retardation took them away from GPs under their TCS policy. Officially it was Transforming Community Services (TCS) although most use Transferring (to the private sector) as the T word as it reflects reality more accurately.
Social services keep a record of children at risk or of concern but cannot for some reason give us a list of children on its register that are patients at ND Central because "it is on paper". They nonetheless expect a GP to attend a case conference when rung late in the afternoon before the meeting to be held next morning with full surgeries already booked. The GMC say we should attend these because Mr. Hodges says so or else.
This is akin to our experiences of working in A&E when asking if a child was on an at risk register meant getting more senior hospital administrators to open safes then it would take to get a nuclear missile's launch codes. And that was in hours if you were lucky and before Data Protection Acts and EU legislation.
Some local intel from CQC and Ofsted inspections from nearby Soviets suggests that communication failures are to blame so will we get our health visitors back? Oh no comrades the communication failures are because computer does not talk onto computer and so this must be addressed immediately.
So we have a local system where the health visitors and social services enter their information on a computer system which does not speak to any GP or hospital clinical system. Add to this the "quality" of the national summary care record noted here and ask yourself do social workers, police officers, neighbours, family members etc. carry the Party card?
One can see the problems looming large like the visible tip of an iceberg miles across. This iceberg is huge and unsinkable due to political diktats and a computer system will not stop it for these problems have existed for years.
Remember the ice breaker here will be produced by British Medical Computing (BMC) which has a superb track record of failure to deliver, failure to deliver on time and failure to provide frontline clinical staff with anything useful.
If professionals now are finding it harder to talk to each other as a result of Party policy (TCS) and computers don't talk to each other now how will this work? The data is sitting in various sources but data in isolation is useless.
You cannot interrogate a computer but "search" a health visitor about little Tom Smith and you won't just get name, rank and serial number you will get a whole lot more. Similarly with social workers, school nurses, police officers et al you get pieces of a jigsaw which sometimes just one piece or person holds the missing link and one might be able to connect all the pieces together. Computers can't do jigsaws.
And will this be delivered by 2015? Dream on guys yet another NHS IT initiative that will deliver nothing but costs.
And will never help those it should. Ever.
Praise be to the Party for giving us yet another IT failure so big it will be seen galaxies away as an information black hole sucking everything into it but giving sod all back out in return.
Until the next one.
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