I'm sorry if this comes across as pessimistic but I believe that the NHS will die unless seriously intelligent reforms are made to it. These reforms will probably not be possible because of inertia in the system. What happened to Stafford Hospital is a snapshot of what will come to other NHS trusts.
When the NHS was established in the 1940s, technology in hospitals was far simpler. In many cases medical procedures were carried out using simple hand tools. The most complicated piece of equipment in a hospital was probably an X-Ray machine. A modern hospital contains tens of thousands of pieces of advanced machinery.
This costs a large amount of money to buy.
This costs a large amount of money to maintain and service.
This costs a large amount of money to provide staff training.
The amount of money spent by hospitals on advanced medical devices and IT equipment keeps increasing year after year and is a substantial part of the NHS budget.
If this isn't bad enough in itself, the NHS is not very good when it comes to using and deploying technology due to its cumbersome and antiquated management structure along with the mentality of a high proportion of its staff. The NHS is clearly not a visionary and progressive organisation.
Only a small fraction of medical devices are specifically designed for the NHS. A high proportion of them are off the shelf products primarily designed for the US healthcare market.
The situation is marginally better with software although NHS IT projects are known to have been expensive disasters.
Therefore, is technology killing the NHS?
