The IT failure is not having anything better
> NHS trusts would be banned from buying the outdated devices.
If they still do the required job they can hardly be called outdated.
They might be inefficient, expensive, slow or unreliable. But if they haven't been replaced by something better, that tells us that the "alternatives" aren't actually better (however you choose to define the word).
That would seem to me to be a pretty damning failure of IT. That is it unable to come up with a solution that is acceptable.
But we know that many IT solutions aren't in fact solutions at all. Just more complicated substitutes. Ones that often perform the basic function worse than the thing they replace (not surprising if the original has been refined and modified over decades of use and experience) and offer a load of unwanted and never-user ancillary functions. Ones that seemed to the IT people to be a good idea, or were just easy to implement.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
