Reply to post: Move On Folks, Nothing Of Surprise To See Here

90 per cent of the UK's NHS is STILL relying on Windows XP

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Move On Folks, Nothing Of Surprise To See Here

As someone who used to work in a permanent role in NHS IT until made redundant, I can tell people reading this that the trusts in question simply don't have the resources to do anything about it. IT support in the NHS is a daily reactionary process, fire-fighting, if they manage even that. In most trusts it is regarded as a necessary evil, an unwelcome financial overhead, in terms of hardware, software and staff support. If they are still running XP it means the PCs in question are probably incapable of running any other version of Windows and don't have the staff resources or the financial means to outsource upgrading as a project anyway. In the county I worked in, only one Trust out of the four had a rolling replacement programme. Of the other three, only a number of months ago I learnt that one of the teaching hospitals was still running XP, even though they had outsourced IT support to the IT services arm of a really world-famous IT company. Apparently the expectation was that support would be cheaper and better than a continued in-house operation, but if they actually saved any money none of it was re-invested. This was a hospital that once applied for Foundation Hospital status.

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