Debacle over Scotland's late, complicated and horribly named NHS app says it all – Stephen Jardine
The NHS England app has been working well for seven years, but Scotland decided it just had to invent its own version...
Somewhere deep in the bowels of Scottish Government HQ is the Digital Directorate. Their main job is telling people who have IT problems to switch their computer off and on again, but for the past few years they’ve had another sisyphean task – developing the NHS Scotland app.
There was an easy option. They could have utilised the NHS England app which has been working well since 2019 with 38 million users but that looked and felt a bit, well, English. So the Scottish Government decreed a new app should be designed from scratch.
It’s been a long time coming. Originally scheduled for launch in 2023 as Scotland’s ‘digital health front door’, enquiries about its development always received the same response – it’s coming…. and please stop asking difficult questions. Now at last it’s here, three years late and at a cost of £17 million.
Wrong information?
Let’s delve into this technological wonder. First you have to download the app and go through a sign-in process so complex, it feels like you are trying to access the nuclear codes. Of course, medical information is confidential and needs to be protected… except you can phone up a GP surgery and get test results for anyone as long as you have a name and date of birth.
Once inside the horribly named MyCareScot app, you can check repeat prescriptions, vaccinations and allergies. Interestingly I seem to have one nobody has ever told me about. Or more likely, it’s just wrong.
In time, we are promised, we might even be able to check our medical records and book appointments. Imagine that? Being able to make a booking like we’ve been doing with airlines, restaurants and hotels for years. What a time to be alive!
Meanwhile, in England, patients can make appointments, view health records, track referrals, order prescriptions, register for organ donation and get instant advice on medical matters.
Full functionality... in four years
The app debacle is symptomatic of everything wrong with the NHS in Scotland where paracetamol on prescription costs £8.53, compared to 35p in the supermarket. As with procurement, a huge and unwieldy bureaucracy is struggling with tasks which, outside the NHS, are done quickly and easily.
Teams seconded from digital wunderkinds Rockstar North or Skyscanner could have devised a brilliant NHS Scotland app in less time than it takes the Digital Directorate to update their MySpace accounts. Instead the project went through the usual public process that takes forever and always produces less than satisfactory results.
We are told full functionality will be available in four years. For context, four years ago generative artificial intelligence wasn’t even widely available to the public. Now many of us use it on a daily basis. That is how fast technology moves nowadays… except in Scotland’s Digital Directorate.
This week new Prime Minister Andy Burnham warned the NHS in England “will collapse” if social care is not reformed. There is no reason to believe the same is not true here in Scotland. It was a stark warning but we need some plain speaking and honesty about the problems facing the National Health Service and that can start with what has gone wrong with what should be a simple app.
Improvements are needed and needed fast. It’s not about politics, it’s about people and they won’t remain patient for ever.
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