Hi all

On surfacing after a hairy night on call I'd like to contribute to the
"GPASS is manky/no it's great" debate

Declan wrote

> 1. Old-fashioned approach with no vision at all of the possibilities of
GP  computing..

Well to be fair, it was written in the 1970's in MBASIC as a repeat
prescribing program with the ability to use diagnostic codes (College ones
as Dr Read hadn't got his available yet !).  Money was wrung from the
Scottish Office IT people eventually to rewrite it in C so that the program
could be run on SCO UNIX and a 386 (wow!!) rather than an Amstrad (which we
still use for word processing sometimes).    Various things have been
"bolted on" such as appointments and fundholding and the search
facilities/coding have been modernised.  believe me they are a lot quicker
but the core of the old GPASS is still based David Ferguson's "prescribe". 
 The User's group and others chased the Scottish Office for years to get a
modern rewrite.  A year or so ago by (allegedly) threatening to swop
wholesale to another system, money was produced and the organisation
rejigged and taken over by the Health Department.   A complete rewrite was
organised.  That can't be done overnight.  (There aren't quite that many
things on the shelf in this line Ahmad).  They published a timetable for
the changeover and are sticking to it (that's rare in IT)  The vision is
there but it was blinkered financially for years.   The attitude was "we
know about computers and you'll like what we give you"  Strangely the users
group disagreed cos they knew a fair bit about computers and a lot about
medicine.

> 2. Slow cumbersome software written for civil servants.

Agree about the slow and cumbersome compared with newer products but in the
70's and early 80s it was state of the art (please don't blame me for being
alive then - I was state of the art in those days too)

David Ferguson was and is a practicing GP.  He no longer works with GPASS
but has written a finance package used by a lot more folk than use GPASS. 
<GPpayroll.co.uk>

> 3. Refusal to accept that any of us might know anything at all about
> computers---hence silly stuff like forbidding access to clean-up
utilities
> (such as Tidy on the old Xenix.) 

Not surprising that GPASS aren't keen on folk guddling about in their
programs.   You mean none of us have tried something and bitten off more
than we could chew?  It's patient data here not just computer games   Have
you looked at Microsnot's license recently:-)   A few years ago Mike Hendry
(Ex chairman of the Scottish user's group and MBE in January) wrote some
utilities to tidy up stuff and give better searches.   GPASS didn't endorse
it as they hadn't field tested it -  a bit like a black triangle in MIMS. 
The university of Aberdeen Department of General practice regularly scan
anonymously (by disc) several hundred Scottish practices and produce
accurate prescribing and diagnostic data.  They also produce a set of
utilities to tidy up the hard disc and facilitate searches.  I've lost
their URL at present but they're at the Aberdeen Uni site.  I don't know if
the utilities work with the Irish version of GPASS tho ;-)

> 4. Blanket ban on putting any other software--such as a WP package---on
the  same machine as GPASS.  

Why on earth would you want to ??  No such ban on us (see answer above) and
our GPASS machine is so busy doing scripts, searches that a separate
machine is used in the office for word processing.   With the new all
singing all dancing Windows version and a network it will be possible to
drag and drop stuff.

I'm no anorak and my only declaration of interest is having had 2 sessions
at GPASS headquarters as a non anorak who is likely to use the machine and
is running a paper system at present.   (RAD development.)  What I've seen
of the new stuff  in development is good and with the final polishing
should be even better.  So far it has vastly improved getting about on the
system with mouse movements and clicks as against the interminable
keystrokes (even with macros)  The GPASS team regularly visit Users group
meetings both  to demonstrate the stuff and listen to comments (they even
act on some of them !).  I should say that much of the history above is
alleged and definitely not the official version so it's not fair to ask Bob
to comment  other than on factual stuff about the new system and old ;-)

Sorry to rabbit on so much.

BTW Ahmad 
>standard,  -  windows
> cheap,   -  free
> off the shelf....   - which shelf?

Tom


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