The NHS IT system - beyond a fiasco
08 May 2007 - Bruno Prior
What is the word for a story that reached the level of fiasco some time ago and continued to deteriorate? Fiasco seems inadequate as a decription of the failures of the NHS IT system, several of which have been noted on this site by JG.
The Times has picked up on analysis in -Computer Weekly- magazine, which reports that the NHS IT systems experienced "more than 200 breakdowns in four months, potentially putting patients at risk". The incidents, between October and January, were "serious enough to be described as 'major incidents'", but Connecting for Health, which runs the project, dismissed the report saying that "the figures were misleading". Would that be misleading in the sense of making a good system look bad? I don't think so. Sounds worthy of comment to me, but we have become so inured to bad news on this front that the story only makes their "News in Brief" section.