Editor's blog Wednesday 31 March 2010: NHS Connecting For Health unplugged?

Hi. No time at all to write summat proper today, but the significant newsflash is that it seems like it might be all over bar the legal shouting for NHS Connecting For Health.

The true state of things is unclear, as this tweet from E Health Inside shows.

But it doesn't look good.

If it is bad (if unsurprising) news from CSC and iSoft, then nobody in their right mind will be glad about it. In a period of sustained financial contraction, the NHS needs proper, pan-system working IT to deliver better services for less cash as never before.

We ain't got better IT - a key bit of it. The whole 'national programme' scheme was flawed from the start: the point where it became all about a 'smart procurement' and not about a decisive set of interoperability standards.

Now here we are again with NHS IT, in a familiar-smelling, messy, warm situation.

Like a baby that has shat itself. Again.

As Dick the butcher said to Jack Cade the rebel in Henry Vi Pt 2, "the first thing we'll do, let's kill all the lawyers".

I like butchers: they're realists in so many important ways. But they don't tend to end up writing history.