It’s a kind of slime that seeps into the cracks and crevices of organisations.
Rots the foundations, from the roots, up.
It stands between man and his god. No, not religion… the bureaucracy that religion invents.
The bureaucracy that stands between reality and innovation.
It was bureaucracy that allowed a space craft to venture into the heavens with frozen O-rings. It is bureaucracy that dissolves ideas. It is a fungus.
Bureaucracy killed people when conventional procurement delayed PPE. Bureaucracy disenfranchises people. Instead of looking out, to the horizon for ideas and the-new, bureaucracy forces us to look inwards and down.
Government after government has promised to end bureaucracy. It never does. Bureaucracy is the friend of the mediocre and the hiding place of the under-average.
The press don’t help. They like bureaucracy. It creates contact points. Sources and gossip.
Everyone in the system is safe because of bureaucracy. No one is at risk, no one has to make a decision, no one has to do anything new.
Bureaucracy keeps the public and service users at arm’s length. Bureaucracy and petty intrigue go hand in hand.
If there was a way to clip its wings, curtail it or make us think differently, it would be the urgency and immediacy that the management of healthcare, by the use of technology, could bring to the day-to-day. Data and data management. Data-driven, decision support, could sweep bureaucracy away.
Bureaucracy… creates delays, duplication, interfaces and costs lives.
It saves lives by preventing us from making the same mistakes again and again.
Data collects our errors and uncertainties and gives us decision support and alternatives.
Data collects the best of the past and carries it into the future.
Data is a compass, a combine harvester, a deep mine-excavator and if it were a creature, it would be a sheep-dog.
Data saves lives but this wretched, miserable, meandering, confused document kills off all thoughts that the future looks anything more than bureaucrat-fest, leaden and thoughtless.
In the sixth sentence of the ministerial foreword, reviewing the impact of Covid on the here-and-now, it says;
‘…Data made all the difference…’
It didn’t. What made the real difference were the people who took bureaucracy to the top floor of their building and threw it off… and got on using the data.
Matthew Gould, boss of NHSX, during the early days of Covid, made a difference by telling people to forget the rules about sharing data, do it anyway and just be sensible. He made a difference. That one decision saved lives. How many, we will never know.
This wretched document, a cross between a Barbara Cartland fantasy and a sci-fi comic is so bad, it will grind all innovation to a halt. It is so awful I can’t bring myself to speak another word about it.
The author deserves to have their toothbrush deep-frozen, their shower-gel replaced with detergent, wear a chicken suit for a month. Have the report hung around their neck with a sign… I wrote this bilge.
In case you are remotely interested, the document has 96 commitments, I lost count but I think, 10 new organisations and a promise of 6 pieces of major legislation. Ridiculous time lines and daft targets.
If you are minded to believe any of this is going to happen, I suggest you contact the tooth-fairy for a reality check.
It is bad, bad, bad and a perfect example of why the NHS’ relationship with the IT sector is so bad.
Why there has been so little progress in moving from pencil and paper. Why the NHS is dangerous, repetitive and comes to work in a Ford Cortina.
The IT sector, who have clearly egged-on this non-sense, should have the report sent to their mothers, who would see, at once, what charlatans they’ve turned out.
No18 should be chained to Dominic Cummings, armed with a bodkin and made to read it to him.
