£1.50p well spent

If you have £1.50p to spare, do buy a copy of this week's Private Eye.

The magazine has an excellent, well researched and highly readable account of the government's massively expensive, useless and dysfunctional IT system Connecting for Health which is currently bankrupting the NHS but making some computer boffins very rich indeed.

I quote from the introduction:

"Waste and inefficiency in the NHSis intolerable",declared Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt one year ago amid mounting deficits."A penny wasted is a penny stolen from a patient". This is the story of the theft of 1,240,000,000,000 pennies from patients through an IT project that wasn't wanted and doesn't work. It tells how political vanity, official incompetence and vested interests have wreaked havoc on the health service - and calls for a halt to the ultimate in a long line of New Labour computer cock-ups before it's too late.

Please read this important article