Government bans fax machines in the NHS

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Northerner

Northerner

Admin (Retired)
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
The NHS will be banned from buying fax machines from next month - and has been told by the government to phase out the machines entirely by 31 March 2020.

In July, the Royal College of Surgeons revealed nearly 9,000 fax machines were in use across the NHS in England.

The Department of Health said a change to more modern communication methods was needed to improve patient safety and cyber security.

An RCS spokesman said they supported the government's decision.

In place of fax machines, the Department of Health said secure email should be used.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46497526

I don't know, the next thing they will be talking about is the 'paperless office' 😱 Oh, hold on, they were talking about that when I started out as a computer programmer back in 1985! 😱 🙄
 
Northerner said:
The NHS will be banned from buying fax machines from next month - and has been told by the government to phase out the machines entirely by 31 March 2020.

In July, the Royal College of Surgeons revealed nearly 9,000 fax machines were in use across the NHS in England.

The Department of Health said a change to more modern communication methods was needed to improve patient safety and cyber security.

An RCS spokesman said they supported the government's decision.

In place of fax machines, the Department of Health said secure email should be used.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46497526

I don't know, the next thing they will be talking about is the 'paperless office' 😱 Oh, hold on, they were talking about that when I started out as a computer programmer back in 1985! 😱 🙄
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I remember a video presentation we had in the Department of Employment about the paperless office in the early eighties prior to the move away from punched tape.

Paper reports increased exponentially.
 
khskel said:
I remember a video presentation we had in the Department of Employment about the paperless office in the early eighties prior to the move away from punched tape.

Paper reports increased exponentially.
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I'll always remember on my training course (Control Data TOPS course, Leeds 🙂) learning COBOL and having it drilled into us never to miss out the full stop in Working.storage - of course, someone then did (not me!!!), and the compiler treated every character after that point as an error and spewed out an entire box of paper 😱

I think the paperless office was being talked about in the same breath as the 'leisure society', when machines would have taken over all the mundane jobs and we'd have loads of well-paid free time 🙄 We should be about 15 years into that right now! 😱 🙂
 
My parents were told in 1965 there would be a cure within 5 years. Within 5 years of what I have no idea 🙄
 
Pumper_Sue said:
My parents were told in 1965 there would be a cure within 5 years. Within 5 years of what I have no idea 🙄
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Yeah within 5 years of death.
 
Pumper_Sue said:
My parents were told in 1965 there would be a cure within 5 years. Within 5 years of what I have no idea
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Well I might have still been diagnosed but I'd have soon been cured of it obviously - though Kidderminster General was never in the first echelon of diabetes care, our Consultant was one of the teaching professors at the QE/Bham Medical School so had access to all the latest everything.

Just think - you'd have all missed knowing me ……… !
 
Northerner said:
I'll always remember on my training course (Control Data TOPS course, Leeds 🙂) learning COBOL and having it drilled into us never to miss out the full stop in Working.storage - of course, someone then did (not me!!!), and the compiler treated every character after that point as an error and spewed out an entire box of paper 😱
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Sounds like a very badly written compiler; Borland's Turbo Pascal, when faced with an error like that, would report about 15 errors (it may have been fewer) and then give up with a final message along the lines of "too many errors, aborting".
 
robert@fm said:
Sounds like a very badly written compiler; Borland's Turbo Pascal, when faced with an error like that, would report about 15 errors (it may have been fewer) and then give up with a final message along the lines of "too many errors, aborting".
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Well, to give you an idea of how old the computer was, it had a 'Winchester' hard drive! 😱
 
Aye, probably as old as the Winchester ‘73 rifle used by James Stewart in the western of the same name:D
 
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