Adrian Midgley wrote:
> 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 _guaranteed_ 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....
All to do with multiple agencies issuing and a large mobile population.
Mainly a problem with areas of large migrant and immigrant
populations, like list size "inflation"
It may not be as bad as that as the figure comes from comparing number
of NHS numbers issued with census returns and other data.
But there are enough people with multiple NHS numbers to make it a bit
of a farce.
,
Trefor
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