There’s always someone who has the latest tech but cannot work out how to use any of the settings, apart from play and stop. There’s always someone who thinks technology is the solution without realising what the problem is.
Ever since Keir Starmer and his Labour cronies were elected, I’ve suspected that person is Health Secretary Wes Streeting. The Government’s recent announcement of so-called “groundbreaking new tech” in the form of a tool called Cancer 360 proves to me that I’ve been right all along.
Cancer 360 sounds like the kind of product dreamt up by a failing team on The Apprentice with five minutes to go before settling on an awful logo. But instead of all being fired by Lord Sugar, it’s the name of a tool that will supposedly transform cancer diagnosis.
I would like to think the moniker was thought up by someone at the Department for Health who still cannot believe they managed to get it past their bosses. After all, it’s called Cancer 360 and if you turn 360 degrees you get back to exactly where you started from.
As someone who has learned the hard way that the fight when you have cancer is trying to get good treatment from your hospital, I think Cancer 360 is an excellent idea in principle. Its aim is to ensure millions of patients receive faster cancer diagnosis and cut treatment delays.
Anyone would be foolish to say that these aren’t great aims, but it just shows how little the Health Secretary and the Government know about how the NHS works. They want to have a system where all my data about tests, appointments, and treatments is in one place.
This is a good idea in theory because there are only so many times I can sit in a consultation at which the medic copies results from one hospital trust from my phone into his notebook and then types them on to the computer system for his hospital trust — especially after I have suggested just emailing them to him.
But allowing hospital trusts to openly share information would require a radical overhaul of all NHS computing systems, not just the promised land of Cancer 360. After all, I’m mainly treated for cancer at one trust but my lead consultant works at another one and I’m still officially a patient at three other hospital trusts.
Oncologists are very clever but how would they, and the health system, cope with the idea that patients are people and have more issues than just cancer? No 10 needs to go back to basics and realise that, instead of being in a futuristic world of printers that don’t jam and computers that don’t crash, the NHS is years away from being able to introduce Cancer 360 as anything more than a gimmick.
This is illustrated by the fact that we are still in a position where nurses are writing on patients in a bid to try and get other nursing staff to pay attention to them.
Yes, you read that correctly.
On more than one occasion, nurses from one section of the hospital where I’m treated for bowel cancer have written a note on my dressings. The message is intended for nursing staff on the wards and is intended to help them know how to treat me. But the ward staff always ignore this note and the corresponding report on the non-Cancer 360 system.
Just in case Wes Streeting ever visits the “world-leading” cancer hospital where I get treatment, I’m going to write a message on my chest in marker pen which says “Technology is great as part of the solution, but you don’t even know what the issues are. Get to grips with those and then come back to us.” And, if truth be told, I’d much prefer a visit from one of the therapy dogs they sometimes have while I’m waiting for blood tests than Wes.