This raises a second question: are NHS managers taking the wrong approach when it comes to achieving efficiency savings in the National Health Service? MPs say they are seeing short-term cuts (‘salami slicing’) and penny-pinching instead of any attempt to redesign processes and apply radical thinking to old ways of doing things so as to find new ways to the same goal.

Squeezing of what you have instead of redesigning what you have is recognised by management experts as the very worst way of dealing with budget cuts.

The evidence seems to be against the government here. Or to be rather more frank: Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, who’s never been that great at the communications thing, is just not getting his point over. The stakeholders in the NHS who really matter – the big unions, the BMA, the NHS Confederation, a vocal sector of the Left who have been very good at mobilizing opposition via social media to the Health and Social Care Bill – are winning the arguments he should be.

At the same time, the changes to the NHS that any reasonable person can see are needed – the fact that we need a lot more technology in there, there has to be much more integration with social care to stop people needing that expensive hospital treatment – are just not being properly thought about, let alone introduced.

As the Committee’s chair has said, “The priority is to deliver more efficient care, in order to meet demands placed upon the system – and the implementation of the bill has to fit in around that… The only way you can meet the demands placed upon the system by patients is by changing not the way the system is managed, but the system itself.”

Meanwhile – we are years behind where we should be with NHS informatics due to missed opportunities with the National Programme.

If Lansley doesn’t change his approach here the risk is that the Bill will founder, no attempt to get efficiency will really be made – and we’re just going to leave the ‘bill’ for fixing this for another generation. Do you want that?

All the latest Public Sector ICT news, views and analysis provided by Publictechnology.net