Quicksilva thoughts...

This week the Department of Health and CfH have agreed CfH will take on the responsibility of the NHS Choices Project bringing another NHS IT project under the CfH Banner. NHS Choices is soon to become the ‘one stop shop’ for the NHS online services, becoming the point of access for services such as HealthSpace, the online personal health organiser and the NHS Direct along with its current features.

I firmly believe that this will allow for a more organised and structured approach to the development of the NHS services online. Bringing all services under one portal site has to create a more user friendly experience and in turn increase public support for the Services and the NHS/CfH Vision of a connected health service. Developing NHS Choices into a portal site will allow CfH to fashion a standardised user interface across all services and create a Single sign on for users which can follow a “stringent authorisation procedure” to ensure security across the board enhancing user confidence in the services.

If this service is developed in this way I believe the NHS will have created an application that I and many others would use regularly knowing its security and its advanced benefit adding features.

Quicksilva thoughts...

It looks like the pace is really picking up for a joined up government, with this in mind eHealth Insider have launched a new conference for interoperability in healthcare. The promise of multi disciplinary working and sharing information across distributed IT systems can be of definite benefit to us all. However, it must be done correctly with safety and privacy under close scrutiny. This is why it is important to have such events which can focus on the benefits and ways of mitigating the risks.

Quicksilva thoughts...

We appear to be hell bent on repeating the same old mistakes time and time again. In the latest breaches we have seen sensitive data being lost in both hard and soft copy; the Blears laptop, top secret documents left on a train by a senior Cabinet Office official and some 30,000 patient records lost in two separate incidents (Wolverhampton and London). In Wolverhampton the 11,000 records were on a laptop stolen from a GPs car – the records were detailed and NOT encrypted.

These continued occurrences breach every rule, regulation or accredited good practice ever written bringing into question the investment in ‘Best Practice’. I believe such guidelines are necessary to setting the cultural tone in respect of handling sensitive data. However, the criminal act is that we accept the ‘weak and lame’ excuses, usually from powerful people, for the blatant disregard of the safeguards put in place to protect our national, homeland or individual security and privacy. We must stop accepting blind reassurances and letters of apology – we must start to hold individuals, irrespective of seniority, accountable for data security.

Quicksilva thoughts...

County councils seem to have been caught up with the excitement of Big Brother on Channel4, several have admitted to using private records such as phone and email as well as CCTV to investigate trivial public offences. We’re living in an age where combating terrorism and serious crime is high on the Governments agenda, and as more power is given to the authorities members of the public are becoming concerned with privacy. There are plenty of arguments for and against increased powers for authorities, but the simplicity of it is that sceptics will see this as misuse of privileges on the Councils part, which will potentially alienate an already unconvinced public.

Quicksilva thoughts...

On a recent trip to America I was fortunate enough to travel through the Everglades National Park. Some photographic highlights included a Red Shouldered Hawk a Snowy Egret and a large colony of nesting Sooty Terns but the joy of these one-off sightings were soon quashed when the guide on the trip told us some unsettling facts and figures about the eco system. The damming of a large lake in central Florida has deprived this area of natural water resources for many years and that coupled with the fact it hadn't rained in two years meant much of the wildlife had gone off in search of greener shores. Written accounts from approx 100 years ago describes the sun being blacked out for 20 minutes as thousands, maybe millions of birds set off in flight. After hearing this I made sure to conserve water wherever possible, reusing towels in the hotels and showering promptly and not letting the tap run when brushing my teeth.

On my return from the 2 week trip I found myself confronted with 10 piles of washing and I was again thinking about water and energy conservation. On average, every person in the UK uses 150 litres of water each day. A washing machine uses approximately 110 litres for a full load! Recently some clever people at Xeros Ltd have developed a washing machine that cleans clothes by pounding them with plastic chips and only requires a cup of water to be added to each wash and therefore uses less than 2% of the water - and energy - of a conventional model. The inventors claim it could save billions of litres of water a year....

Unfortunately the plastic chips only have a limited shelf life which brings about questions with waste and recycling and who knows how clothes will stand up to being 'pounded with plastic chips' but it is an innovative technological advancement with the environment in mind. Lets hope we see more of these advances in technology that challenge us to go about our daily lives in a 'greener' way.