Unique NHS number eh?
Speaking as someone who used to work in healthcare IT but escaped before the current fiasco started...
In the beginning was the NHS number.
And it came in 23 different formats, and there were duplicates which had been issued historically.
So a project was created to allocate everyone a New NHS number.
And it ate a lot of time and effort for everyone.
And when it was rolled out... d'you know what happened?
In the early stages... the systems managed to issue duplicates again.
And as far as I know they are still there.
I also used to work in interfacing healthcare IT systems with one another, and was involved in one of the earliest EDI projects in the NHS, to send pathology results from Hospital path labs to GPs.
And just at the point where we had a few pilot hospital sites sending results electronically, using a standard message, to a few GP practices...
Someone at the Department of Health got a bee in their bonnet about the European Standardisation Effort for medical messaging...
...and suddenly started mandating that everyone should implement a new, different set of standard messages - without any additional funding of course - which set the cause of healthcare EDI back a good couple of years.
Then just as that was sorting itself out, some idiot at the Department of Health realised that all this old-fashioned EDIFACT stuff was rather old hat, and there was this new thing on the block called XML, and another argument started over why everyone was using EDIFACT and we should all move to XML as the encoding scheme, quietly ignoring the fact that no message schemas had been defined in XML yet, and we had already changed horses once causing great upheaval.
So the current balls-up is basically just the logical conclusion of that sort of stupidity, with the addition of Tony Blair behaving like an idiot, compounded by the fact that there is now no in-house NHS IT capability since the organisations which used to provide in-house NHS developments were all outsourced to the likes of EDS and CSC many years ago when Virginia Bottomley was the Health Secretary.
Nothing changes...