[danielgrieve]

As a web developer within the NHS (though in Scotland) I can already tell you that the problem won't be that NHS staff can't code, but will be that they won't be allowed to code.

The main issue is always the archaic IT department who lock down computers, rendering them near useless. That would be the first place to start. Then we can start teaching our staff to do something other than create a Word document and visit their staff Intranet.

[arihelgason]

This rings true with my experience.

I met a senior NHS physician who built a very useful and simple mobile information service to improve access to certain services. My understanding was that he funded it himself with help from sponsors and had to do it entirely outside the NHS system.

It probably cost 1/10th of what it would have cost if it had been done through the NHS.

Not to mention that NHS computers are still running IE6 and heavily locked down, making it a poor development environment. Tim Kelsey can encourage NHS staff to code, but the infrastructure to do anything meaningful with that inside the system isn't there.

This is the service: http://sxt.org.uk

[robgough]

The biggest risk here would surely be that around PID (Patient Identifiable Data). Who is responsible for ensuring the safety of this data?

As it is right now, it's ultimately the trusts themselves (as is my understanding), but what safeguards will there (or could there) be in place to keep this data safe.

And what about that data? Do we force any new staff-written applications to create their own MPI etc. or do we let them access the main systems through some kind of API? In which case, that would need creating - and interfacing to a variety of different software is never simple. If it's all to stay on the internal network, then who hosts these apps - and where does that budget come from?

There are a lot of big questions and potential risks here and I'd be very interested to see what these eye-catching initiatives turn out to be. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I remain pessimistic about these being anything but trivial and largely pointless.

If this was a serious effort, why ask the doctors, nurses and other clinical staff to learn to code - and not reach out to the open-source development community and ask them for their help. I'm sure a great many developers have, or know someone, who has used the NHS and would love to have a part in making things better.

[danielgrieve]

I have to agree with pretty much all of your points.

Securing Patient Identifiable Data should be near (if not at) the top of the list of priorities. Some API where data can be requested which only returns non-PID data would probably be the way forward, but there will certainly be cases where there is a need for certain data that will be identifiable.

I'd probably say that NHS staff don't need to learn how to code, but should instead work much closer with those who can.

As in an "insider" there is an endless list of services that could be improved with software if we could just open our doors slightly.