Interviewer: "And how do you see your first year in the post?"

Response: "Well, I'd sack the first three tiers of this hideously top-heavy administration and re-route the newly released funds to provide every hospital with an additional 50% more nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, porters and ancilliory workers (janitors, security, receptionists etc); shift cleaning back to in-house where it belongs, buy back the carparks so that visitors no longer get charged for helping us to entertain their loved ones; then I'd double everyone's wages, buy every doctor, nurse and trainee their own laptop and set up a small data centre in each hospital to network them using a simple spreadsheet for taking bookings from surgeries over the telephone and syphon off the other half of the money to a secret Swiss bank account.

Interviewer: "I see. The Swiss bank account seems quite reasonable but I have a few problems with the rest of your statement. Thank you, don't call us"

...poisoned chalice?

This is a job for a couple of over-paid tossers if ever I saw one.

...anyone not ruled out by reason of being stark slathering bug**** is going to look at these posts and be thinking words like "chalice", "poisoned" and "not for all the tea in China, sunshine"?

God, what thankless jobs they'd both be.

and get it over with.

Look for more departures of both contractors and managers. After all, who in their right mind wants a load on ignorant plebs shouting slandering them from the safety of the House of Commons, and that's just the ones who went to Eton.

"the big picture of delivering our overall IT vision" - who writes this stuff? what are they on?

I was a programmer working in the NHS in the early 1980s and clearly remember the Wessex HISS debacle. I can't remember any successful large-scale NHS system, although there are thousands of very successful small-scale ones.

It should also be borne in mind that almost all of the successful systems and projects were designed, managed and implemented by dedicated public sector NHS employees. Almost every private sector involvement that I can recall was an expensive farce.

Why is it so difficult to understand that the private sector works for short-term profit and has little interest in providing a working solution for public services. The worse the job they do, the longer they will be 'supporting' it.

The government should stop throwing away tax-payers money on private companies & consultancies and create public sector excellence by rebuilding a public sector software industry.

Jean

I must agree that the NHS is run by people who seem to be from Mars, they have no concept of how IT should be implemented. I work as a contractor for the NHS and I am employed to be reactive to problems and not proactive. If I identify a possible problem I am encouraged to ignore it until it becomes a problem, its a mad system. The pay for an IT professional is a joke, some of the people I work with are only band 3, they could get the same money being porters or cleaners and have no responsibilities, In fact I don't know why they stay in jobs where they are treated so badly. At least being a contractor I can walk away when it gets to much. There are so many things I see and hear that are wrong, eveyone I meet has their own story about the NHS, I see dirty wards run by people who have given up on making a difference, I speak to admin staff who are overworked but I also see staff who are underworked and just make themselves look busy. There is apathy throughout the whole NHS which can be quite negative. They call the "IT Helpdesk" the "no IT helpdesk " because it takes us so long to fix their IT problems. The IT people on the ground struggle to stay focused on the jobs in hand because they are expected to solve every problem on every system without the benefit of training. Most of the staff who use Pc's for their everyday work are hopeless, they lack basic IT skills and get little or no training in the programs they use. I could go on and on but even I am depressing myself now.