WRITTEN ON November 10th, 2007 BY Ruth Kennedy AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, Pertinent Art, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

Initiatives such as ContactPoint and eCAF to improve sharing of social care information continue to provoke controversy. In light of the fears that surround the use of technology in the public sector, one of our favourite think tanks* today suggests that we should be looking ‘backwards not forwards’ (sorry Tony), for a solution.

The obvious answer is to keep social care records in Latin.

This is already a proven approach. Traditionally doctors wrote prescriptions in Latin, with the advantage that only trained professionals could understand what they meant. The doctor and the pharmacist knew what medication the patient was using, but for the bulk of the population (including the patients themselves) the prescription was pretty meaningless. Exactly the same benefits would apply to latin social care records. Professionals could communicate with each other, but with the exception of lawyers, archaeologists, and priests, few members of the public would be able to understand what they were saying. And if you can’t trust lawyers and priests, who can you trust?

Sadly, the use of latin in prescriptions has largely been overtaken by modern medication and 21st century technology. Today only a few standard abbreviations remain in use. But the solution worked well for about 600 years. We doubt whether eCAFS and ContactPoint will prove as durable.

Of course there will be some objections to this idea. For example, it would involve teaching latin to at least 250,000 social workers (five times the combination of 35,000 family doctors and 16,000 community pharmacists). But this is just a temporary problem. Faced with a limited range of career options there are already 16,000 pupils who obtain a classics GCSE each year (30,000 study social sciences at the same stage). With a wider range of caring professions open to them, the supply of candidates with a GCSE pass would surely increase. In the meantime, we estimate that 250,000 existing social workers could be taught latin for just £1.7bn. This represents just 6% of the annual cost of social services. If the programme was spread over three years it would add a mere 2% to the budget. At first glance, this may look like a large amount of money. It is, we admit, more than 40 times the £40m cost of Contactpoint, but on the other hand it is only a quarter of the cost of the NHS National Programme for IT. Surely a small price to pay for privacy.

In 600 years time, with their privacy intact, a grateful public will have forgotten about the initial cost – or so the argument goes.

So while some may accuse us of being luddites, we commend social care records in latin as the obvious way forward for a durable, and secure solution, that avoids technology risk.

Or I THINK that’s what they said…?

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*Cheers Pete