Tichtheid wrote: Thu Jun 26, 2025 9:19 am
Slick wrote: Thu Jun 26, 2025 8:48 am
Another slow hand clap for Scottish government delivery regarding the roll out of the much vaunted and comprehensive NHS App.
When I say comprehensive I mean if you live in Lanarkshire and have a dermatology issue, because that's all it's going to cover.
Cracking stuff again.
I can't find this - the only thing I can find is a company being awarded the contract to deliver the Digital Front Door app at the end of last month
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2025/05/b ... -contract/
It would take some doing to dislodge the ferries fiasco as the Scottish government’s most embarrassing policy failure. But the lamentable saga of the new NHS Scotland app looks like a contender.
Turning around a troubled 120-year-old shipyard must be difficult and I do not envy the managers at Ferguson Marine on the lower Clyde. But an app? We in Scotland are meant to be good at this kind of thing.
Edinburgh has an international reputation for fintech, the portmanteau word for financial technology. This is hard won. A while ago a senior RBS executive told me how she had transformed the bank’s smartphone app. She split her large team into small groups, told each of them to think of themselves as a Silicon Valley start-up, then banished them from the office until they had come up with a world-beating solution. It worked.
Scotland is currently home to more than 200 fintech companies. A government website boasts this success is “led by some of the world’s leading experts in the fields of data, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain”.
This is something of which we should be proud. But any international advantage we might claim is somewhat undermined when our government’s flagship technology project is reminiscent of a ferry with painted-on windows.
In recent weeks I have used my elderly smartphone to book dinner at my favourite restaurant, top up an Isa, buy a rail ticket to Dundee to visit my mother, check in for a transatlantic flight, transfer a large sum of money between bank accounts and purchase numerous second-hand books I did not need.
And yet if I had been seeking a GP appointment I would have had to phone my local surgery at 8.30am precisely and pray to the gods of telephony that I wasn’t 20th in the queue. Trying to secure a doctor’s appointment is like operating a teddy-picker in an amusement arcade.
John Swinney is acutely aware of deep public frustration over GP appointments. In January he decided to step in. After receiving assurances from fellow ministers he announced that the Scottish NHS’s “digital front door” would finally be launched in December.
This has proved a tad overoptimistic.
This week The Times reported that the December app launch will cover just one medical speciality: dermatology. And only in one health board area: Lanarkshire. If you live in Carluke and suffer from eczema, this is great news. For the rest of us, less so.
Why has a comprehensive NHS Scotland app been such a struggle? It is not as if this is some kind of digital Everest. Denmark has had an app for two decades. England’s app — which allows patients to manage hospital appointments, check test results, order repeat prescriptions and access records — has been operational for six years.
What seems to be lacking here can be summed up in one word — grip. Wes Streeting, England’s health secretary, may not be everybody’s cup of tea but it cannot be denied he is very much in charge of the NHS south of the border. Neil Gray, his Scottish counterpart? Not so much.
I accept that systemic issues within the Scottish health service pose particular challenges. We in Scotland have never had a culture within our NHS where the needs of the patient come first. Clinical needs, yes, absolutely. But in terms of making patients feel they are in control of their own care, with full and easy access to their records and a degree of choice in where, when and how they are treated, we have consistently lagged behind England.
In large part this is due to a category error. Scotland’s politicians and health professionals resisted the market reforms introduced by successive Tory and new Labour governments. Sometimes this resistance was justified. But the Scottish health establishment lost sight of the way these reforms can give patients a sense of personal agency over their treatment.
Both baby and bathwater were jettisoned. We would be dealt with where and when and how the Scottish NHS decided. And we would be grateful.
Our NHS app had to negotiate a culture inimical to the very idea of patient choice in a way that was simply not the case south of the border. This goes some way to explaining what has happened. But it does not excuse it.
You can look at this saga as yet another public procurement foul-up. Another Edinburgh trams. A snafu. But this is about more than money and time, important though they undoubtedly are. This is about human beings at some of the most vulnerable moments in their lives.
A patient who feels engaged with their treatment, who feels informed, who feels they have choices, is surely more likely to benefit from that treatment.
Transparency. Communication. Participation. These can produce better outcomes, better recovery times, better survival rates. Yes, a more patient-focused approach can save lives.
No pressure, then.
EDIT: More information here:
https://www.scotsman.com/health/the-lon ... nt-5190793
and Labour campaigned the 2019 General Election on having another referendum with the option of remaining in the EU.