On Friday 30 April 2004 14:54, Trefor Roscoe wrote:

> Failure, over 1% are duplicates, it's a disaster

!#####!  Amazing.

I recall that a perfectly reasonable apprehension that the old NHS ID strings
(sometimes termed "numbers")  were not _garanteed_ to be unique, and the also
reasonable observations that they appeared in various forms, MSRS 244 might
be in another area presented as MSRS/244 or even MSRS:244 and these could be
hard to handle.

The sensible decision was clearly made that only one form of punctuation was
to be used, and any person with MSRS 244 or any of the others was to become
MSRS/244   -  IIRC.

Very memorable - it's mine as it happens, and 9 years later ...


I believe most HA areas had cleaned their lists, to get everyone into the same
format, I recall doing that in the Practice - it took no more work than a
couple of lines of Perl, although I was using something far less effective in
those days.

Then suddenly there was a change, which i suppose now we understand will have
represented a different mandarin or faction gaining control, a new manager of
a department, or some part of the designed turmoil between NHS Exec, IPU and
NHSIA and a new idea was announced - start from scratch and use 9 digit
nonces with a check digit.

(nonce - number to use once)

I recall the ludicrous but I assumed human cockup with all neonates being
given the same batch of numbers, since all the CDs were the same, but i also
recall that being sorted out.

I think that the questions of who made that decision, who championed it, and
what jobs they currently enjoy, and the relation fo those jobs and their
circumstances to any contractors on the job are now in order.

It actually seems quite mind-boggling to me that firstly such a process could
be done so as to fail (when all that was needed was inspection of the
existing ID strings and changing the few that collided, if indeed there were
any at all - I've never heard anyone claim to have actually found a
collision) and secondly that the solution proposed could be to start again
with an alternative system - I do hope nobody has suggested the latter.

Anyway, Mr blunkett is convinced he can do better, with his cards....



--
Adrian Midgley                   (Linux desktop)
GP, Exeter
http://www.defoam.net/