Over the last few weeks, I've had several people ask me about the recent hack on the NHS. A ransomware attack has meant that several hospitals have cancelled operations and there is now an urgent demand for blood donors. What does it say about the state of NHS IT that this attack has happened? Nothing. Because the NHS was not hacked. Instead, a company they use to perform blood tests was attacked. Synnovis is the company responsible - they're the ones who have fallen prey to an attacker.…
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I was speaking to the absolute epitome of a pub bore. Flapping his jaws about how the problem with the NHS was too many admin staff doing absolutely nothing. "Quite right!" I said, feverishly agreeing with his red-faced ranting, "Nurses should spend less time helping patients and more time ordering bandages!" He paused, slightly, as the gears in his brain started grinding. "Well, no, not like that. Obviously." I agreed again, "Too true. Doctors shouldn't be installing computers either. They…
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Tom Dolan has an excellent blog post which touches, in part, on comparative cost. If you're working for, say, a TV company - then you know exactly how much an hour of TV programming costs on average. If you want to do something like build a website, it's quite natural for people to evaluate its budget in terms of how many hours of TV it costs. That can be a useful metric. It allows people to benchmark the impact your non-core project is having against the investment. But, in my experience, it …
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I returned home from holiday to a pile of letters. Mostly junk, a few Christmas cards, and something from the NHS. This is what the envelope looked like: As it happens, I'm not particularly concerned about who knows I had a fairly normal medical procedure. I've blogged a bit about it and Tweeted about the experience in an attempt to de-stigmatise it. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentMorning folks!I survived the night, and now have a couple of hours to wait until someone…
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Last time it was a mid-pandemic trip to a giant shopping mall. This time, a pre-Xmas trip to a youth centre. Glamorous! I always feel slightly boring when I answer the pre-donation questionnaire. No, I haven't been travelling to exotic locations, having sex with multiple strangers in exchange for drugs and money. I could blame lockdown, but it's unlikely I'd be doing those things anyway! Bit of an odd one this time. My blood was too "fizzy" to do the iron level drop - so they had to do it the …
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I am in awe of how simple the booster shot booking process was. I visited the site on my phone while in bed and hungover, typed in my NHS number, confirmed a few details, and it listed a pharmacy a 20 minute walk away as having appointments. A couple of weeks later and my 2xAZ was supplemented with 0.5x Moderna / SpikeVax. What a cool name - my inner Buffy fan is very happy to have been "Spiked" 🧛 Not quite early enough to be fully boosted for Xmas party season, but there's a limit to how mu…
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It has been a year since I stopped working for NHSX. A few weeks ago, someone reached out to me inquiring about a job there. They wanted to know what they needed to know before joining. As well as the normal moaning about the quality of vending machine coffee, I told them about three things which caught me off-guard when I joined. So, here for your edification, are three things I wish I'd known about NHS technology before I joined... The NHS Doesn't Exist I often tell people that the NHS…
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Nine weeks ago, I got my first does of the AZ vaccine. Yesterday, I received my second. Despite all the dire warnings of overloaded websites and limited slots, the booking process was boringly anticlimactic. I entered my NHS number, date of birth, postcode - and was then given a choice of locations. I picked one, and was given a range of times. I picked one for a few days hence and my wife - on the computer next to me - picked hers for five minutes later. Only after booking did we bother to…
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About a million years ago, my wife's work sent her on a training course optimistically titled "How To Use Excel As A Database." We were both horrified. Excel is a perfectly good spreadsheet program - but it is categorically not a database! OK, it has rows and columns which sorta look like a database table. And you can put constraints on cells which mimic a schema. And, yes, you can sort and query data. And you can join data across multiple tables. And... you know what...? Excel is a pretty…
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I know exactly what I was doing on 9th April 2020. I was worrying about open-sourcing the NHS Covid Tracing app. I was worrying about tech standards for booking test slots. I was worrying if I'd ever see my family and friends again. I was worrying if the NHS websites would contain enough semantic HTML to be useful. I was worrying if the security of 3rd party sites was up to snuff. I was worrying about the Inevitable Pubic Inquiry. I was worrying worrying worrying late into the night. Terence…
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I wrote this before the pandemic. I chickened out of publishing it because I was working for NHSX at the time. Some of these things have come to pass. Some are yet to come. I'll never forget the look of horror on my professor's face when I told him I didn't think his university course was good value for money. I was in the first cohort of UK students paying tuition fees. A massive £1,000 per year. A group of us had gathered to complain about the poor quality teaching materials on a specific …
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One of the (many many many) things our team worked on this week finally went live: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentYou can now access most NHS services from your mobile, with no data charges.In awe of the team who pulled this together very quickly. gov.uk/government/new…gov.ukMobile networks remove data charges for online NHS coronavirus adviceFree access to online NHS services will be available for as long as coronavirus (COVID-19) remains widespread in the UK.❤️ 507💬 17♻️ 019:30 - Wed 18 Mar…
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