I am writing this while waiting for an un-engaged telephone line to my doctor’s surgery to leave an administrative message asking for another administrative message to be sent to another part of the NHS half a kilometre away. The content of the latter is not private but the surgery has forgotten to send it for a fortnight.

I have been using e-mail for 25 years and text messages on my mobile for nearly a decade. Both are more reliable than the post or voice messages on answerphones. Having observed the NHS from the inside for much of the last year following heart surgery, I have been struck by the contrast between the excellence of the medical care and the primitive quality of the administration. The latter reminds me of the civil service in the 1970’s which was then a decade behind finance, transport, manufacturing, retailing and publishing in handling information and communications around the world. Co-operation up and down the supply chain and competition across it drove change; advances in one industry were adopted quickly and failures exposed early while they were comparatively small.

Will the NHS never learn?

For example, I’ve recently had brushes with our local council’s planning Development Framework; and with a specific planning application. These were partly via the web and partly via exhibitions & meetings etc.