jason and the jargonauts: more social care gobbledygook

jason and the jargonauts

Welcome to the column seeking to expose purveyors of social care gobbledygook

● King’s College Hospital, London, has contracted out ferrying patients to appointments in ambulances. However, the contract can’t be that clear as last month a man dialed for an ambulance to be told one wasn’t available. So he took a taxi to the hospital where he saw several ambulances clamped. Apparently, clamping ambulances in designated ambulance parking bays is an “effective deterrent” to ambulance loitering and a “means of ensuring that parking spaces are kept available”, according to the hospital. You work it out.

● The integrated children’s system marches on despite its unpopularity. Liquidlogic has signed new customers to its PROTOCOL system and is delivering eCAF (sounds like an internet cafe). Liquidlogic adds: “Authorities, with legacy adult systems, are already using the personalisation agenda as an opportunity to review their IT provision.” A legacy adult system? Is that what you leave someone in a will? All this ICS and IAS has increased the company’s turnover by 40%, and delivered £1.3m profit. You see, someone likes it.

● St Helens & Knowsley NHS has chosen “leading vendor-independent storage integrator, B2net” to streamline the trust’s “storage system by reducing its backup window, and implementing a single-tiered backup solution”. B2net uses “Symantec Enterprise Vault and NetApp FAS3040 Cluster and FAS3040”. So that’s all clear then. But what must have convinced the NHS was “NetApp solution provides the Trust with the single storage worm capability”. Worms, stored in a hospital – not nice is it?

➔ E-mail your observations to keith.sellick@yahoo.co.uk