NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns - Comments

The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS. Money is burnt at an alarming rate and the companies taking on these contracts are incompetent at best.

If staff don't want to work with it then they're not fulfilling their roles.

What if any of us took a job and then refused to work with Microsoft or [Insert company] due to personal reasons? We'd be jobless.

I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.

Partially redacted details here. The award was over 5 years for half that amount, but could be extended to 10.

https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/0f8a65b5-2...

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/apparently-the-nhs-is-the-wor...

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/removi...

nhs is famous dumb and has spent years trying to stop using fax machine. £330 million is nothing over a few years.. NHS budget for 2024/25 is circa £242 billion.

the entire annual intake from capital gains tax is £20 million or so

The NHS is a huge organisation (~2 million employees alone) with enormous problems along these lines - they should pay 10x if it delivers.

Reductive take

Or those execs are ignorant about their staff's concerns.

I suppose the issue is that the NHS themselves have historically been terrible at managing their software. Nobody I know who I rate as even mediocre and above would or have worked at the NHS, and those I do know who have have, I wouldn't hire into junior roles.

I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing.

Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever.

So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many.

There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers.

Just my 2p

> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.

I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.

Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.

That would imply that their annual budget was £1.8e14, which I seriously doubt.

Even if I assume that you meant 0.02%, which is equal to 0.0002, that would put their budget at £1.8e12, which I am also strongly inclined to doubt.

The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS. Money is burnt at an alarming rate and the companies taking on these contracts are incompetent at best.

If staff don't want to work with it then they're not fulfilling their roles.

What if any of us took a job and then refused to work with Microsoft or [Insert company] due to personal reasons? We'd be jobless.

I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.

Partially redacted details here. The award was over 5 years for half that amount, but could be extended to 10.

https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/0f8a65b5-2...

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/apparently-the-nhs-is-the-wor...

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/removi...

nhs is famous dumb and has spent years trying to stop using fax machine. £330 million is nothing over a few years.. NHS budget for 2024/25 is circa £242 billion.

the entire annual intake from capital gains tax is £20 million or so

The NHS is a huge organisation (~2 million employees alone) with enormous problems along these lines - they should pay 10x if it delivers.

Reductive take

Or those execs are ignorant about their staff's concerns.

I suppose the issue is that the NHS themselves have historically been terrible at managing their software. Nobody I know who I rate as even mediocre and above would or have worked at the NHS, and those I do know who have have, I wouldn't hire into junior roles.

I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing.

Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever.

So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many.

There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers.

Just my 2p

> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.

I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.

Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.

That would imply that their annual budget was £1.8e14, which I seriously doubt.

Even if I assume that you meant 0.02%, which is equal to 0.0002, that would put their budget at £1.8e12, which I am also strongly inclined to doubt.