It comes as little surprise that the NHS HealthSpace system si to be reviewed yet again. Anyone familiar with this online 'personal health organiser' (and there are precious few of them) will be aware that it provides very little functionality that is not better provided elsewhere.
Having been thrown together hastily by a government / Department of Health keen to be seen as at the cutting edge of Web 2.0, it has had next to no development or investment, whilst the decision to tie it in to Summary Care Record (SCR) rollout has added and unwelcome political dimention. The unfortunate truth is that the SCR in its current form will not pull ih the crowds for HealthSpace.
So what are we to make of the decision to continue with the service pending another review? Trisha Greenhalgh, the lead reviewer for the UCL team looking into the SCR and HealthSpace is scathing of NHS Connecting for Health for not recognising the system's failings and taking the bull by the horns:
“It shows a bit of a lack of courage from NHS Connecting for Health that it can’t actually look squarely at something that hasn’t taken off and
say ‘well that didn’t work did it? Let’s stop pouring money into it’ – they kind of just left it hanging.”
Whilst the sentiment is quite correct - someone in authority ought to make this decision - the problem is that it's not CFH's call to do so. Saddled with a government policy to deliver the thing, CFH cannot just turn it off without the policy owner in the Department of Health taking responsibility for the decision. As is so often the case, nobody in the DH is actually willing to take that decision.
So we have an impasse: people in CFH know that HealthSpace is a crock, but lack the authority to do anything about it. The people responsible for the policy in DH can't or won't make a decision. So CFH must continue to provide the bare minimum life support for a service it thinks is pointless and rubbish, but DH continue to keep it on the policy roster and occasionally big it up for a soundbite.
Ah, the machinations of government.
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