>> It’s laughable that the data collation problem at PHE was because they were using an excel file format superseded in 2007
Just as an aside, in 1990 or thereabouts I did some work in the NHS, for Wessex, and one of the things I looked at was a particular monthly report they were doing.
Each hospital completed a report in Excel. They then printed it out and a motorcycle courier took it to the area supervising organisation, I forget the hierarchy now. The printed spreadsheet from each hospital was rekeyed into the area consolidation spreadsheet which was then printed and couriered to the regional office. There the area spreadsheets were all rekeyed into the regional consolidation spreadsheet for submission to London. Every month.
You should have seen the incredulity when all I suggested was that they courier it on floppy disk rather than hard copy to avoid keying errors.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, surprises me about NHS admin.
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