FrontPoint Systems Ltd

Then:

Hansard record

13 Mar 2007 : Column 314W

Dr. Murrison: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what the projected cost was of the Medical Training Application Service at the instigation of the service; and what the latest estimate is of the cost of the service. [126460]

Ms Rosie Winterton [holding answer 9 March 2007]: The projected cost of the medical training application service at instigation was £5.8 million over five years for an England only service. Expanding to United Kingdom wide coverage and incorporating academic/specialty and general practitioner recruitment into a single, two-round recruitment exercise has slightly increased set-up costs. The projected cost of the service is now expected to be £6.3 million over five years.

Now:

Written answer on the 23rd of April.

Dr. Murrison: To ask the Secretary of State for Health how much has been paid to the Work Psychology Partnership in connection with the medical training application service. [128713]

Ms Rosie Winterton: There is a contract in place between the Department and Work Psychology Partnership for the sum of £92,950 excluding VAT. Work Psychology Partnership are contracted to provide advice and tools to support the recruitment and selection into specialty training programmes, for which the Medical Training Application Service facilitates applications.

Dr. Murrison: To ask the Secretary of State for Health how much has been spent on the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS); and how much has been allocated to MTAS for 2007-08. [128715]

Ms Rosie Winterton: The cost of the Medical Training Application Service (including set up costs) is £1.9 million in 2006-07. The budgets for 2007-08 have not yet been agreed.

So far this fiasco looks like it will cost a lot more.

And this excerpt shows what process certifications are really worth:

Mr. Graham Stuart: To ask the Secretary of State for Health whether the Modernising Medical Careers and Medical Training Application Service process has been formally quality assured; and if she will make a statement. [129699]

Ms Rosie Winterton: The Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) processes have been developed following extensive consultation which included both paper based and workshop based reviews within a formal project quality management framework. The MTAS information technology system is provided by an ISO9000 accredited supplier and has been reviewed and found fit to be for purpose.

The Modernising Medical Careers programmes itself has been subject to scrutiny by the Office of Government Commerce Gateway Review process in both 2005 and 2006.

Well, that worked out very well in the end then, didn’t it?

As I have tried repeatedly to impress upon the Department of Health, measures & certifications like OGC Gateway Reviews & ISO 9000 are a very basic form of quality assurance and do not really provide much confidence that the finished product will be satisfactory.

The entire quality assurance strategy of the Commercial Directorate has become subject to the mistaken idea that a satisfactory demonstration of process on paper is adequate to guarantee the quality of the services being procured. This is a fallacy that has been pointed out to them time and again. Process verification is just the very basic first step & the department does the NHS / public no favours by refusing to test its purchases beyond that.

Will any software professional with the most basic pretensions to competence admit to letting this happen?

Anyone can register for an MTAS account simply by using an anonymous email account with no further verification required.

Any applicant can see ANY correspondence sent by another candidate or from MTAS to another candidate by just going to his inbox and changing the message number displayed in the url.

You do not even need to log onto the MTAS site. Dr Crippen has just been sent a URL, which ends in four numbers. Put any random four numbers in at the end and you are taken straight to a MTAS reply to a junior doctor offering him/her a job. The recipient is not named, but it is probable he/she could be traced by replying to the hospital who offered the job.

The URL on its own is enough to see the inbox of anyone without any password or log in! It basically means that all correspondence that has taken place is sitting on the Internet completely unprotected, all you need is the URL. Once the inbox URL is known you can even send emails for that person.

Bolting the stable doors after the horse is in the next county appears to be what the DoH do best.

This after Lord Hunt’s apology this afternoon for yesterday’s debacle.

Channel 4 news report this evening.

And I was flabbergasted to read this:

Director general of IT for the NHS, Richard Granger, told a Commons select committee he wished he was running the junior doctors system because then it “might not have gone wrong”.

So Channel 4 call him out on it by claiming that a previous failure occurred on his watch. We are given to understand that this is to do with the personal details of doctors who attended a conference in February organised by Connecting for Health who had their personal information displayed on the CfH site & from where it was only taken down after two weeks. We are told that it is still available in the Google cache for the site.

BBC report.

Jobsite & Methods Consulting ought to have known much much better than to be responsible for this sorry spectacle. And the DoH need to go away and read the guidance from their own colleagues.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Clinical, Medical Informatics, NHS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.